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TRACTS. 


No. 1. 


£l)c Bigl)ts of ilJomen. 



Letter to Horace Greeley. 

PJ 


BY 


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THEODORE TILTON. 


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T O r* " ■ 

V J L 1 .. 


Published at the Office of 

THE GOLDEN AGE, 

9 Spruce St., New York. 

1871. 


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ME. TILTON TO ME. GEEELEY. 


Me. Horace Greeley, 

My Friend , 


Ml 




Ais is the “off-year” in politics, and the dull season in 
newspapers. The Tammany frauds constitute the only 
vital topic now astir, and this the Times possesses in fee 
simple. By and by the opening battle against Grant’s 
renomination will thunder along the line, and your in¬ 
terest in this, whether as presidential candidate, or in 
your higher function as editor of the Tribune , will en¬ 
gross your whole mind. Just now, in the lull, seems 
the ot opportunity (if you care to welcome it) to ac- 
oei<fc a proposition which grew out of our correspond- 
en * ‘ of last week, namely, that we should compare 
uui views of woman suffrage —yours against and mine 
for it. But if you are summering at your farm, I can 
hardly ask you to cease toying with your plough or ax 
for the sake of returning a day too soon to the habitual 
weariness of the most industrious of pens. So while I 
would be glad (yes, and honored) if you would notice 
some points which I herewith set down, I shall take it 
as no discourtesy if you prefer to discontinue this de¬ 
bate. 

I. You believe in the principle of Democratic Gov¬ 
ernment—in other words, as Mr. Lincoln phrased it, 
“ government of the people, by the people, and for the 
“people.” But this principle, as I hold it, includes 
both men and women. The American republic is com¬ 
posed of both sexes. Its government exacts the allegi¬ 
ance of both sexes. Its laws, to a great extent, apply 
equally (though to too great an extent unequally) to 
both sexes. Its office-holders are, to no inconsiderable 
degree, of both sexes. Its taxes fall with unrelenting 
rigor on both sexes. Now to make our institutions log- 


4 


ically consistent, the elective franchise should belong 
equally to both sexes. Is it not so ? 

II. You believe, with Thomas Jefferson, that “gov- 
“ ernments derive their just powers from the consent 
“of the governed.” But, among the “governed,” 
whose “ consent” is to be thus given or withheld, about 
one-half are women. And yet the government, in de¬ 
fiance of its charter, which is the Declaration of Inde¬ 
pendence, violates one of its fundamental principles by 
remorselessly denying to one-half its citizens any voice 
in making the laws under which they are to live and 
die. Is this right or wrong ? 

III. You cling to trial by jury. Now, the courts 
teem with cases affecting the rights, interests, and 
honor of women. For instance, take the case of a mo¬ 
ther’s plea for the custody of her children as against the 
claim of a divorced and drunken husband. I hold that 
no jury can adequately appreciate, and therefore none 
can justly settle, such a case unless its twelve members 
include women as well as men. The horror which you 
have expressed of women “effective before juries,” 
leads me to say that I am personally acquainted with 
several amiable and excellent ladies at the West who 
are duly authorized attorneys at law and practitioners 
in the courts. And you yourself have not forgot¬ 
ten Portia ? Now if women can stand and plead at the 
bar, tell me why they cannot sit and listen on the 
jury ? 

IV. You defend the American maxim of “no taxation 
“without representation.” But I can point you to an 
army of women who are compelled to submit to taxa¬ 
tion, but who are not accorded representation. In 
England, this injustice has lately been swept away, and 
women as well as men, if they own taxable property, 
exercise in that country the elective franchise. When 
Henry Vincent was last in New York, he told me that 
he saw three thousand women in Manchester go to the 
polls—just as they might have gone to the postoffice, 


5 


or to the city library, or to church. Why would you 
put the right of suffrage in a republic under greater 
restrictions than in a monarchy ? 

V. Speaking of England, I remind you that its 
governmental head is a representative of that sex to 
whom you allow no share in the government at all. 
Your friend John Bright is happy to acknowledge that 
a woman may be rightfully and illustriously the chief 
of the state. But if that same woman were an Ameri¬ 
can, you would be distressed to see her exercising 
even the humble sovereignty of her simple citizenship. 
Is not the English view, as Mr. Bright holds it, more 
a credit to an enlightened age than the American view, 
as you teach it ? 

VI. You admit that women should have a chance to 
earn their living. Nothing which the optimists may say of 
the duty of every man to support some woman (either 
wife, mother, sister, or daughter), can blind you or me 

/to the solemn fact that, morning and evening, to an^f 
from their half-paid toil, past your office and mine, 
there marches an army of women who fight the battle 
of life alone—women who, by death, have lost the 
props of their lives—women whose sons moulder on 
their country’s battlefields—women, young and help¬ 
less, entering into their womanhood with no daily sup¬ 
port save their own industry—women who, if they are 
to live in virtue and not in shame, must have work to 
do, and wages for doing it. Now, in your speeches to 
workingmen, I have heard you say that one of their 
most precious privileges was the ballot. You have 
shown great skill in tracing a connection between the 
workingman’s suffrage and the workingman’s wages— 
how the mechanic, the farmer, or the fisherman would 
find that the ballot in his hand was money in 
his pocket. No writer in the land has insisted 
more sedulously than you that the negro, in order 
to fix his wages and secure his pay, should have 
his franchise. Now if the ballot will achieve all this for 




6 


the wages of a man, have the kindness to inform me 
why it will effect nothing for the wages of a wo¬ 
man ? 

VII. You are generous enough to acknowledge that wo¬ 
men should have an education. They are as much en¬ 
titled to it as men. A generation or more ago, the 
New England high schools were opened to girls as well 
as hoys. The result to-day is that the New England 
women, as a mass, are the most intelligent body of their 
sex in America. Now I want this good beginning 
carried to a better ei^d by throwing open, not only our 
common schools, but our colleges and universities, to 
both sexes—instead of restricting these higher institu¬ 
tions, as now, to young men alone. If Michigan Uni¬ 
versity and Oberlin and other colleges in the West are 
free to women, tell me why Yale and Harvard and 
other colleges of the East should not be conducted 
on the same humane and catholic plan ? 

VIII. You have expressed an abhorrence of the idea 
that your daughters should become public speakers. 
This, I confess, surprises me. Have I not seen you re¬ 
peatedly presiding over public meetings addressed by 
women ? Have you not proclaimed, both in th eTribune 
and elsewhere, the delight with which you used to sit 
under the ministry of Rev. Antoinette Brown Black- 
well ? Furthermore, would it grieve or delight you if 
your daughters should have the gift of song, and go 
before the public as Jenny Lind once did, or as Chris¬ 
tine Nilsson now does ? But what is the difference, 
in principle, between a woman’s singing and a wo¬ 
man’s speaking ? 

IX. You say, “ My conception of the nature and scope 
“ of the marriage relation renders my conversion to wo- 
“ man suffrage a moral impossibility. ” Your implication 
is that woman suffrage tends to dissolve marriage. If you 
mean by this that woman suffrage will give to women 
their just rights in the marriage relation, including the 
right to dissolve it for good cause, then I should be 


still more eager for woman suffrage than I now am. I 
quoted to you last week the declaration of the American 
Woman Suffrage Association, “Resolved, that woman suf¬ 
frage means the perpetuity of the marriage relation. ” 
That resolution, I think, reflects the sentiment of the 
great body of woman suffragists. But my own view is 
that woman suffrage will neither destroy marriage on 
the one hand, nor perpetuate it on the other. For, mar¬ 
riage is an interest common to women and men. How 
then will woman’s vote affect it more than man’s? Men 
have the franchise, but have they used it to vote away 
marriage ? When women get the franchise, will they 
use it to vote away marriage ? No. If the marriage 
institution is ever to be done away, the first motion 
toward its abolition will come from men, not from wo¬ 
men. It was Hamlet, not Ophelia, who said, “I will 
“ have no more marriages.” Consider one thing,namely, 
the loving nature which God has given to woman. There 
is nothing that a woman so much wants as a home and 
to dwell in it as the happy wife of a noble husband 
and as the loving mother of beautiful childre 
is every woman’s ideal. Now if the ballot in 
is to have any effect at all on her social life, 
voluntarily use this ballot for the destruction 
her soul considers the most sacred thing on eart 
can you persuade yourself that women would \oteto ab¬ 
rogate that very marriage which men vote to maintain? 
But even if women would do this, would not you, and 
other men like you, be thereby proven tyrants over wo¬ 
men in the marriage relation, and would not the neces¬ 
sity be plain that the civil laws regulating this relation 
should be reformed ? 

X. Your letter perorates into a “ hearty hatred for 
“ Free Love and all its delusions.” What do you mean 
by Free Love ? The term is not yet in the dictionaries 
and has no fixed meaning. When I say (as I do) that 
I am opposed to Free Love, I mean by it the promiscu¬ 
ous intercourse of the sexes, in contradistinction to the 


8 


heart’s ideal of monogamic marriage. If this is your 
meaning of the word, then I join you in your rebuke 
of the doctrine and practice. But if by Free Love you 
imply, as many so-called Free Lovers do, simply a more 
liberal and humane treatment by the civil law of the 
whole subject of marriage and divorce—in other words, 
more liberty to the parties concerned and less inter¬ 
ference by the state—then I have no sympathy with 
your accusation, and hold you to be wrong instead of 
right. Whatever may be your idea of the moral duties of 
husband and wife (and perhaps I would not greatly differ 
with you here, certainly not in all you say of mutual pa¬ 
tience and forgiveness), I respectfully ask you to set 
forth how far the state laws—or, in other words, how 
far a majority of citizens—have any moral right to de¬ 
termine for any particular married couple whether these 
twain shall live together or go apart. Will you en¬ 
lighten me ? 

VT > your notion of divorce on the scrip- 

it is far from scriptural. Your words 
b the Master spoken otherwise, I would 
ned adultery a sufficient reason for dis- 
rriage.” But what is Christ’s idea of 
lie says, “Whoso looketh upon a woman 
“ to lust after her, hath already committed adultery 
“with her in his heart.” Now if you base your 
doctrine of divorce on Christ’s definition of adultery, 
and if you press this doctrine to the full extent of that 
definition, you would divorce three-quarters or nine- 
tenths of all the marriages in Christendom. Moreover, 
turning from Christ to Paul, I refer you to the seventh 
chapter of First Corinthians, and particularly to a 
memorable passage in it which Conybeare and Howson 
have translated as follows: “If the unbelieving 
“husband or wife seeks for a divorce , let it not be 
“hindered; for in such cases the believing husband or 
“ wife is not bound to remain under the yoke.” Do you 
not see that, in going to the Scripture to find therein 




\ 


9 

an argument against divorce, you find instead the most 
solemn and sweeping authorization of divorce ? 

XII. You have the following suggestive sentence : 
“ That persistent, flagitious adultery in husband or 
“ wife affords good cause for divorce, I have not meant 
“to deny.” Well, then, would you alter our existing 
law, which grants divorce for adultery, into granting 
it only for “ persistent, flagitious adultery?” If so how 
will the law draw the line between persistent and 
casual, between flagitious and pardonable ? What 
would you think of a proposition by moderate and oc¬ 
casional thieves to amend the law punishing theft 
so as to make it reach only ‘ ‘ persistent, flagitious 
“theft ?” 

XIII. You have helped to make, or at least to keep, 
the divorce law of our own state very illiberal and un¬ 
just. The State of New York grants divorce only for 
adultery. But all the New England States grant divor¬ 
ces for other causes, such as drunkenness, > 
sertion, failure to support, and the like. V 

buke those states for this legislation, ai 

citizens Free Lovers for adopting it ? Or 

be better) will you join me in an ende 

port the Massachusetts legislation on this suojeu L 11± V\-r 

our New York code ? 

XIV. You helped to ratify the Fourteenth and Fif¬ 
teenth Amendments. In so doing, you builded better 
than you knew. These Amendments carry woman suf¬ 
frage with them; and your argument against it comes 
too late. The case is as plain as a Japan crystal. The 
Fourteenth Amendment says: “All persons born or 
“ naturalized in the United States, and subject to the 
“ jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, 
“and of the state wherein they reside. ’* Mr. Bing¬ 
ham, the author of this Amendment, admits that this 
word “ persons” includes “women.” Whatever doubt, 
therefore, has heretofore existed as to whether women 
were citizens, that doubt was removed by the Four- 


>* 

10 

teenth Amendment. Now the old Constitution, Article 
4, said (and still says): “ Citizens of each state 

“ shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities 
“ of citizens in the several states.” What is the mean¬ 
ing of this ? Even so early as Washington’s day, the 
Supreme Court of the United States, through Judge 
Bushrod Washington, decided that among these “privi- 
“ leges and immunities ” was the right to exercise “ the 
“elective franchise. ” Chancellor Kent, Judge Story, and 
the other great lights that have illumined the text of the 
Constitution, long ago united in declaring the same 
thing. The Fourteenth Amendment has since carried 
these “privileges and immunities” a step beyond 
the Fourth Article. This Amendment, after having 
declared all “persons born or naturalized in the United 
“ States” to be “ citizens ” (including women as well as 
men), then immediately adds : “ No state shall make or 
“ enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or 
“ ’mmum'+iesof citizens of the United States.” In other 
ate shall “ abridge the privileges or immuni- 
er of men or women, among which is the 
ercise the elective franchise. ” So you see the 
chain. All persons (including women) are 
citizens have privileges and immunities, in¬ 
cluding suffrage ; therefore women, like other citi¬ 
zens, are entitled to suffrage. If there is any flaw in 
this argument, will you do me the favor to point it 
out ? 

XV. You say, “ Why should any man be the candi¬ 
date for president of the woman suffragists. Logi- 
“cally and consistently, I feel that their candidate 
“shouldbe a woman.” To this I reply, that certainly 
I would have no objection to a woman as a candidate 
either for the presidency or any other office. And yet 
woman suffrage does not require a woman to be its 
candidate any more than negro suffrage demands a ne¬ 
gro for a like position. You have been a prominent 
advocate of negro suffrage, and yet I do not remember 


11 


that yon ever nominated a negro for President of the 
United States. Indeed I once urged you to nominate 
Frederick Douglass forYice-President,but you declined. 
And, if you will pardon me for the digression, since 
you have done me the honor to say that I “invented” you 
as a presidential candidate, will you now let me gratify 
my early and unquenched instinct as an abolitionist by 
similarly “inventing” Mr. Douglass as the candidate 
for Vice-President on your ticket ? 

XVI. This leads me to refer to your sitting at Cooper 
Institute a few evenings ago as chairman of a meeting 
called to hear a speech from Mr. R. B. Elliott, member 
of Congress from South Carolina—a negro. I am 
glad you honored him as you did ; and all I ask you to 
do for woman’s enfranchisement is exactly what you 
have done for the negro’s. But, on that very evening, 
in spite of the fact that the American government still 
refuses the political rights of twenty millions of citizens 
on account of sex, you went to the Tribune office a c 
prefixed to the report of the proceedings the asto i 
ing title, “ Equal Rights to All. ” Now, in view of . cur 
attitude on the woman question, will you not correc the 
next proofsheet of your favorite catch-word into “Equal 
l “Rights for Half?” 

Finally, your recent communication addressed to me 
in my own journal was reprinted by you in yours, but 
not a line of my reply there accompanied it, although 
the other daily papers of New York did equal justice to 
both sides of the controversy. I mention this fact for 
the sake of pledging that every word which you may 
s say as a rejoinder to this present letter, if you print 
your remarks in the Tribune, shall be faithfully re¬ 
printed in The Golden Age. In this way, since I 
can never hope to equal you in ability, I shall at least 
have the honor of excelling you in fairness. 

Ever your friend, 


The Golden Age, Aug. 14,1S71. 


Theodoke Tilton. 





A Weekly Journal devoted to the Free Discussion of all Living 
Questions of Church, Stale, Society, Literature, 

Art, and Moral Deform. 

Published every Wednesday at jVo. 9 Spruce Strcc* 
New York City. 

THEODORE TILTON, 

Editor and Publisher. 

W. T. CLARKE, ------ Associate Editor. 

0. W. RULAND,.Associate Publisher. 

si -,C. IPTION PRICE, $3 a year, cash in advance ; $3 50, if paid at 
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•opv ss, cents. Specimen numbers sent free. 

iHE GOLDEN AGE TRACTS. No. 1. “The Rights of Women.” 
A Letter to Horace Greeley by Theodore Tilton. Price, $3 per hundred, 
sent to any part of the United States postage paid. 

All letters should be addressed to THEODORE TILTON, 

Postoffice Box 2848, 
New York City. 




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TRACTS. 

f 

No. 2. 


Me Constitution 

% <Titlc-B ccd to 'Woman’s Jvmwiusc. 

i. 

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Letter to Charles Sumnei . 

i / 

/ ' ' BY 

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THEODORE TILTON. 

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“How excellent franchise 

In Woman is.” —Chaucer. 

1 — 


Published at the Office of 

• THE GOLDEN AGE, 

9 Spruce St., New York. 

1871. 






















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THE CONSTITUTION A TITLE-DEED TO WOMAN’S 
FRANCHISE. 


<S. 


‘'How excellent franchise 

In woman is ."— Chauceb. 

Charles Sumner, 

Senator of the United States, 

Honored Sir —I am asked by a number of good 
women (neighbors and friends of mine) to solicit 
from you a remedy for a grievance which they suf¬ 
fer. They are public-spirited citizens who want to' 
take a citizen’s part in the next presidential elec¬ 
tion. They believe that the Constitution, by its 
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, secures to 
women, as to other citizens, the right of suffrage. But 
the state-laws of New York, in defiance of the Supremt 
Law of the land, deny to women this right. ]V . 

therefore appeal to you, as senior of the Seuat* a d 
guardian of liberty, to procure the passage of ae Act of 
Congress to enforce the Federal Constitution in the 
State of New York, so that all citizens herein resid.ing, 
who possess the qualifications prescribed by law, may 
exercise unmolested the elective franchise. 

In giving the reasons which warrant (nay, compel) 
this equitable interpretation of the Constitution, I 
am not presuming to enlighten your learned mind on 
the meaning of an instrument which you hold in the sa¬ 
cred keeping of your oath of office, but am simply 
executing a semi-official duty of my own as the presi¬ 
dent (until lately) of a society for the equal rights of 
American citizens without distinction of sex. 

What is a citizen of the United States, or of a state ? 

This question was never explicitly answered in the 
Constitution until the adoption of the Fourteenth 
Amendment. Previous to this Amendment, a Ken- 




4 


tuckian was first a citizen of Kentucky and thereby of 
the United States, but this Amendment makes him 
first a citizen of the United States and thereby of 
Kentucky. Or he may be a citizen of the United 
States and not of a particular state. “All per- 
“sons,” says the Amendment (and mark the sweep of 
the phrase), “all persons born or naturalized in the 
“United States, and subject to the jurisdiction there- 
“of, are citizens of the United States, and of the 
“states wherein they reside.” Even the Judiciary 
Committee of the House of Representatives, in a ma¬ 
jority report against woman’s constitutional right to 
vote, has declared that the term “ all persons” is 
used in this Amendment without limitation by sex ; or 
in other words, that not men only, but women also, 
are citizens. If I here adduce no judicial decision to 
this effect, it is only because the point is too self- 
evident to have been ever questioned in any court. 
When ver raised in the Courts of the United States 

d r egard to parties to action under the Constitu- 

1 ;. it has been brushed away as frivolous. And 
pr >ly the Supreme Court will never say that 
“■all persons” include men and women until it shall 
first Wlcalled upon to say that “all parents” include 
fathers and mothers, or “all children ” boys and girls. 
If, however, anybody for the sake of a cavil should still 
deny that women are citizens, I point him to these 
three facts, namely—to preempt land, one must be a 
citizen ; to register a ship, one must be a citizen; to 
obtain a passport, one must be a citizen ; and to three 
other facts, namely—women preempt land ; women 
register ships ; women obtain passports. Furthermore, 
as when Solomon, in naming three things, added a 
fourth, I add that women are naturalized and thus 
made citizens. In other words, women are citizens. 

Well, then, women being citizens, what are their 
rights as citizens ? 

The Constitution as it stood in the early days, and 


long before it reached the Fourteenth Amendment, de 
dared in the Fourth Article : “ The citizens of each 

“state shall be entitled to all the privileges and immu- 
“ nities of citizens in the several states/’ 

What were these “ priviieges<and immunities ?” 

The Washington Circuit Court, two generations ago, 
through the wise lips of Judge Bushrod Washington, 
declared its unanimous opinion that one of these f ‘ priv¬ 
ileges and immunities” was “to enjoy the elective 
“franchise as regulated and established by the laws 
“ or constitution of the state in which it is to be exer- 
“ cised.” 

The Fourteenth Amendment, a later flower of liberty, 
exhibits these “privileges and ( immunities ” in still full¬ 
er bloom. “No state,” it says, “shall make or enforce 
“ any law which shall abridge the privileges or immu- 
“ nities of citizens of the United States.” 

The difference between the Fourth Article and the 
Fourteenth Amendment (both being similar in phrase¬ 
ology), is strikingly portrayed in a recent decision by 
Justice Bradley, of the Supreme Court of the Unite.! 
States, as follows: “ The new prohibition tha > . 

“ shall make or enforce any law which shall ab : ■ 

“ imvileges or immunities of citizens of the 1 nited 
“ States’ is not identical with the clause in die 'vxm- 
,* ‘ stitution which declared that ‘ the citizens of each 
“ state shall be entitled to all the privileges and im- 
‘ ‘ munities of citizens in the several states. ’ It em- 
“ braces much more. . . The privileges and immu- 

“ nities secured by the original Constitution were 
‘ 1 only such as each state gave to its own citizens. . 

“ But the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits any state 
“ from abridging the privileges or immunities of citi- 
“ zens of the United States, whether its own citizens 
“ or any others. It not merely requires equality of 
“ privileges, but it demands that the privileges and im- 
“ munities of all citizens shall be absolutely unabridged 
“ and unimpaired.” 



Now, from these data, let me swiftly trace the prac¬ 
tical progress of the elective franchise from its early re¬ 
striction to white men to its subsequent inclusion of 
negroes and to its consequent inclusion of women. 

The Federal Constitution in the First Article said : 

‘ ‘ The electors in each state shall have the qualifications 
“ requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of 
“the state legislature”:—a phraseology which, by 
common consent, was taken to mean that not the Na¬ 
tional government, but the states, had authority over 
suffrage—and, accordingly, the states administered suf¬ 
frage to suit themselves, without Federal interference. 
And yet, lest any state, from local prejudice or sectional 
animosity, should injuriously withhold this right from 
citizens moving into it from other states, the Fourth 
Article, with humane liberality, said : ‘ ‘ The citizens of 
“ each state shall be entitled to the privileges and im- 
“ munities of citizens in the several states ” :—or, in 
other words (to quote Justice Washington), shall “ en- 
hn ; elective franchise as regulated and established 
' by the laws or constitution of the state in which it is 
But the states, following a narrow 
a ad unworthy policy, excluded certain of their members 
from citizensib;> and suffrage; for instance, persons 
gv lU j: \ i en born black; and all this was done 
by the states without Federal countercheck, because 
of the universal acknowledgement that the states, and 
not the National government, rightfully controlled suf¬ 
frage. But later, the American people, taught by the 
fiery lesson of a war against slavery, passed the Four¬ 
teenth Amendment, which said: “ All persons born or 
“ naturalized in the United States, and subject to the 
“ jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States 
“ and of the states wherein they reside ” :—thereby no 
longer permitting any state to say to any of its native- 
born or naturalized members, “ You are not citizens.” 
And this Amendment further declared : “ No state shall 
“ make or enforce any law which shall abridge the 


7 


“privileges or immunities of citizens of the United 
“ States” thereby no longer permitting any state to 
say to any of its citizens, “You shall be denied the right 
“ of suffrage,” but, on the contrary, securing to these 
citizens their right of suffrage “ absolutely unabridged 
“ and unimpaired.” v 

In short, under the original Constitution, each state 
gave the right of suffrage to such citizens as it chose, 
without dictation by the Federal government; but un¬ 
der the new Amendments, the Constitution itself now 
directly secures the right of suffrage to citizens of the 
United States, and forbids the states to deny or abridge 
this right. 

Now see what this logic proves for women. An ar¬ 
gument arises from it, step by step, like the rounds of 
a ladder, and conducts us to the high conclusion that 
women, like all other citizens, are already enfranchised 
by the Federal Constitution, and that the os cannot 
disfranchise them without violating the Sup r me L i vy o: 
the land. The successive beads of the rosary c re th( c. 

—inasmuch as, by the Federal Constitution 1 j 
“ sons” (including women) are citizens; nnd mas 
much as citizens have ‘ 4 privileges and im 
among which is suffrage ; and inasmuch as iut*>e 
privileges and immunities, including suffrage, can¬ 
not be denied or abridged by the states, but must 
remain “absolutely unabridged and unimpaired”: 
therefore the National Constitution ordains, first, that 
women, like other citizens, have the right of suffrage ; 
and second, that they have it so securely that the 
states cannot impair or abridge it. 

If I were to take a hammer and chisel, and engrave 
this argument on the wall of Gibraltar, I could not say 
which would be the more impregnable, the logic or the 
rock. 

You are aware that this interpretation is no novel or 
subtle device of mine. I speak as its expositor, not 
its originator. Being, as it is, a palladium of the 



8 


rights of women, I am happy to remember that it was 
first brought into conspicuity by a woman. The anti¬ 
slavery controversy in England owed its final and vic¬ 
torious watchword, namely, “Immediate and Un con- 
“ ditional Emancipation,” to a woman—Mrs. Elizabeth 
Heyrick. In like manner, in the United States, the 
final and victorious watchword for woman’s struggling 
cause, namely, her right of suffrage as decreed already 
by the Constitution, was proclaimed at the Federal^ 
Capital by a woman—Mrs. VictoriaC. Woodhull. You'' 
know this lady. You remember her Memorial, asking 
Congress to enforce her constitutional right to vote. 
You characterized the argument with which she ac¬ 
companied it as one of the ablest that you had ever 
heard. You have not forgotten how it elicited the 
corroboration of many of the best legal minds of the 
country. Nor need you be re-told that it drew forth 
in its favor, from Gen. Benj. F. Butler and Judge 
Ac 'bridge, acting jointly, one of the most laborious 
and admirable reports ever submitted to the House of 
T ep c- i.vti' es. But there can be no higher authority 

its support than the assenting verdict of your own 
judicial mind. 

^ o’e urged against this construction, but, 

. , are found wanting. 

It is objected, for instance, that not the National 
government, but each individual state, has authority 
over suffrage. The preceding reasonings have already 
dealt with this idea. Let me deal with it again, to nail 
it to the counter. Three-quarters of the states solemn¬ 
ly ratified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. 
All the states, as soon as these two Amendments were 
added to the Supreme Law, thereby surrendered to it all 
the powers which these two Amendments contain. 
Among these powers is one prohibiting each and every 
state from abridging or denying the right of suffrage to 
citizens of the United States. So that the states no 
longer possess a function which they have abandoned 


9 


to the National government. And Alexander H. Ste¬ 
phens understands this so well in the case of the negro 
that he wants the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amend¬ 
ments expunged in order that the states may resume 
their power over suffrage, and recall the ballot from a 
race which these Amendments enfranchised. The Na¬ 
tional Constitution, and not state-law, is now the clear 
fountain out of which springs the citizen’s guarantee of 
suffrage. 

Another objection is that, though the Constitution 
prohibits disfranchisement on account of color, it does 
not on account of sex. This argument (or rather, misre¬ 
presentation) is founded on the Fifteenth Amendment, 
which says “ The right of citizens of the United States 
“to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United 
“ States, or by any state, on account of race, color, or 
“ previous condition of servitude.” But of whom does 
this A mendment speak ? Whose rights does it guai an , 
tee ? For what purpose was it framed ? It enacts 
terms declare, “the right of citizens of the Id 
“ States to vote. ” Now who are these citizens ? The 7 
are both men and women—not men alone. The pre¬ 
ceding Amendment had just declared “ all person?: ‘ 
(including women) to be citizens, and had secured U 
both sexes their right of suffrage. The Fifteenth 
Amendment then says, the right of men and women, 
or, to use a shorter phrase, ‘ ‘ the right of citizens of 
“the United States to vote shall not be abridged or 
‘ ‘ denied on account of race, color, or previous condi¬ 
tion of servitude.” In other words, the Fifteenth 
Amendment, legislating in behalf of the whole body of 
citizens, including men and women, provides that, 
however any state may qualify the franchise of these men 
and women on account of age, property, or intelligence, 
nevertheless,it shall not deny this franchise to these men 
or women on account of “race, color, or previous condi¬ 
tion of servitude.” The Fifteenth Amendment was 
born blind to sex, and wears a bandage against color. 



10 


Another objection is that, as the Constitution gives 
to the states the right of fixing the qualifications of 
voters, the states may make sex one of these. To this 
I reply that the citizens, or “ all persons, ” whom the 
Constitution thus presents to the states to be qualified 
as voters, are already shown to be both men and women. 
After the Supreme Law has once enfranchised these men 
and women, the state-laws cannot disfranchise these wo¬ 
men any more than it can these men. All that tin 
states may do is to “ regulate and establish ” suffrage 
by imposing equal qualifications on all citizens both 
men and women. Moreover, what must necessarily be 
the character of these qualifications ? No state can exact 
a qualification which, in the nature of things, cannot be 
attained by the citizen from whom it is required. Thus 
age, property, and intelligence may be made qualifica¬ 
tions because the citizen has a fair chance to attain 
them all. But to impose a specified color or sex as a 
condition precedent to voting is not to qualify but to 
abolish the right of suffrage in the case of all persons 
of the opposite color or sex. For a negro could never 
change his color, nor a woman her sex. To fix im¬ 
possible qualifications is not to “regulate and estab- 
“ lish ” suffrage, but to disestablish and annihilate it al¬ 
together. 

Another objection is that the new Amendments were 
not intended to ordain Woman Suffrage. Neither 
were they intended to prohibit it. Th^ intent (or the 
non-intent) serves my argument as well as it can serve 
the opposite. But with or without an intent, a law 
stands as it is written—Lea; ita scripta est. As written, 
the Constitution secures suffrage to all citizens, whether 
white males, negroes, or women. But was there no 
“ intent ?” I happen to know that a number of able 
men, including Senator Matt Carpenter, George W. 
Julian, Gen. Ashley, Judge Woodward of Pennsylania, 
and others, either during the pendency or after the 
passage of the new Amendments, discovered in them a 


11 


title-deed to Woman Suffrage; and some of these legis¬ 
lators voted for, and others against, these Amendments 
on this account. Furthermore, this discovery, being 
thus promulgated before the Amendments were adopt¬ 
ed, became immediately thereafter the basis of a pow¬ 
erful and widely-echoed demand for the enforcement 
of this construction. It is therefore a cotemporaneous 
judgment, not a long-deferred afterthought, which thus 
takes these two Amendments at their word, nor permits 
them to keep their promise to the ear for the sake of 
breaking it to the hope. Even Mr. Bingham, the 
author of the Fourteenth Amendment, became con¬ 
vinced last winter that this Amendment bore within 
it a richer burden of meaning than he had meant to 
freight it with ; for, when Mrs. Woodhull took her 
claim to Washington, he said to her at first, “ Madam, 
“ you are not a citizen”; and it was not until she 
pointed out to him his own phraseology in the Consti¬ 
tution, namely, “ All persons born or naturalized, etc., 
“ . . are citizens —it was not until he had put on 

his spectacles to read his own handwriting a second 
time that he thereupon acknowledged, as chairman 
of the House Judiciary Committee, that the phrase 
“all persons” must include both sexes. So that 
if the very author of the Fourteenth Amendment has, 
since its adoption, changed his mind concerning its 
“ intent, ” the rest of the people, for the same good 
reason, should do the same vfise thing. 

But you yourself, sir, have taught (and I cannot for¬ 
get the lesson,) that public statutes are to be interpret¬ 
ed evermore in the interest of liberty, and not of 
bondage. In the Senate, Feb. 5, 1869, you said, “The 
“ true rule under the National Constitution, especially 
‘ ‘ since its additional Amendments, is, that anything for 
“ human rights is constitutional.” As if to give digni¬ 
ty to this declaration, you added, “No learning in the 
“books, no skill acquired in courts, no sharpness of 
“ forensic dialects, no cunning in splitting hairs, can 





“ impair the vigor of the constitutional principle which 
‘ ‘ I announce. Whatever you enact for human rights 
• ‘ is constitutional; and this is the Supreme Law of the 
“ land, anything in the constitution or laws of any 
“state to the contrary notwithstanding.” In view of 
this declaration by your own lips, I add the just de¬ 
duction that as civil liberty is as much the human 
right of women as of men ; and as the elective fran¬ 
chise is as much the constitutional right of women as 
of men ; therefore both the law of nature and the law 
of the land unite by their own inherent “intent ” to or¬ 
dain the beneficent enfranchisement of women and men. 

But if this reasoning be too vaguely drawn from 
general principles, and if I be summoned to substitute 
for it what Lord Chatham called “ the statute-book 
“ doubled down in dog’s ears,” I then appeal to the 
same decision of Justice Bradley, of the Supreme 
Court, to which I have already referred, and which, in 
speaking ... the Fourteenth Amendment and its intent, 
Tf the Amendment does in fact bear a broad- 
• ’ meaning, and does extend its protecting shield 
*./ - hose who were never thought of when it was 
> m ■ ved and put in form, and does reach social 
■vils which were never before prohibited by consti- 
“ tutionai enactment, it is to be presumed that the 
American people, in giving it their imprimatur, un- 
“ derstood what they were doing, and meant to decree 
“ what in fact they have decreed.” 

Now, without stopping to answer further objections 
(all of which will answer themselves), I point to Article/ 
Fourth, section second : “ The United States shall 

“ guarantee to every state in this Union a republican 
“ form of government.” -For years, negroes were ex¬ 
cluded from their civil and political rights on the pre¬ 
text that they were not citizens. When negroes were 
declared by the Fourteenth Amendment to be citizens, 
these citizens acceded to the “ privileges and immuni- 
ties” of citizenship, among which was the elective 


13 


franchise. But the very Amendments which thus se¬ 
cured this chief of all “ privileges and immunities” to 
negroes, secured it at the same time to women. To deny 
to negroes in New York State the right of suffrage, 
would be to violate, not only the Fifteenth Amend¬ 
ment, which declares that this right shall not be 
denied on account of color, but to violate also Article 
Fourth, section second, which declares that the United 
States shall guarantee to each state a republican form 
of government. In like manner, to deny this right to 
women is to violate equally the same provision of Ar¬ 
ticle Fourth. A republican form of government, since 
the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amend¬ 
ments, requires just as absolutely the participation of 
negroes and women as it heretofore did of white males. 
A citizen is a citizen, whether white or black, male or 
female. Neither you nor I nor any other man can 
invent a reasonable reason to the contrary. 

I now remind you that the Constitution nowhere 
denies suffrage on account of sex. If any such denial 
is derivable from the instrument, it must be u 
ference. But if there be any denial even by infen :n . 
it is a denial of man’s, not of woman’s franchise. Thus 
the Fourteenth Amendment declared (and this was a 
blot which the Fifteenth rubbed out), “ When the right 
“to vote at any election ... is denied to any of the 
‘ c male inhabitants, ’ ’ etc. Here is an implication that cer¬ 
tain male inhabitants might (for instance, for the crime 
of a tropic skin) be disfranchised. But there is no¬ 
where a single reference, direct or indirect, through the 
entire text of the Constitution, to a possible denial of 
suffrage to female inhabitants. But even if there were 
some such dim allusion, it would melt away and disap¬ 
pear before the clear-shining doctrine that fundamental 
rights, like the right of suffrage, cannot be taken away 
by implication. ''' The fact that a man’s rights are ex¬ 
pressly established does not prove that a woman’s rights 
are impliedly denied. A law which gives the franchise 


k 4 


14 


to men does not thereby refuse it to women. But the 
National Constitution puts an end to all this special 
pleading by comprehensively guaranteeing the right of 
suffrage to all citizens, both men and women. 

I am sure ^ou have often weighed the golden word 
citizen. Wliat is its precious meaning ? Worcester 
defines a citizen to be “ an inhabitant of a republic, 
“who has a right to vote for public officers”; Web¬ 
ster, “a person who has the privilege of exercising 
“ the elective franchise and Bouvier, in the Law Dic¬ 
tionary, “ one who, under the constitution and laws of 
“ the United States, has a right to vote for Representa¬ 
tives in Congress, and other public officers, and who 
“is qualified to fill offices in the gift of the people.” 
In the spirit of all these definitions, the Supreme 
Court has declared as follows : ‘ ‘ There is not to be 

‘ ‘ found, in the theories of writers on government, or 
“in any actual experiment heretofore tried, an exposi¬ 
tion of the term citizen which has not been under¬ 
wood as conferring the actual possession and enjoy¬ 
ment, or the perfect right of acquisition and enjoy¬ 
ment, of an entire equality of privileges, civil and 
political.” 

I am tempted to mention that I have transcribed the 
preceding declaration (which forms part of the de¬ 
cision in the Dred Scott case) without going for' it to a 
law-book, but from one of your own speeches, in which 
you accompany it with the following comment: 
“ Thus,” you say, “ does that terrible judgment, which 
‘ * was like a ban to the colored race, now testify to their 
“indisputable rights as citizens.” My dear friend, on 
reading this passage I was reminded of King David’s 
sage reflection that God causes the wrath of man to 
praise Him, and the remainder thereof He restrains. The 
Dred Scott decision, based on the theory that the ne¬ 
gro was not a citizen, lifted the prerogatives of citizen¬ 
ship so high as to be altogether beyond his reach. But 
in less than ten years after that decision, both negroes 


15 


and women jhave neon constitutionally declared to be 
“ citizens of the United States,"and of the states where- 
‘ ‘ in they reside. ’* They have thus come into simul¬ 
taneous possession of those ‘‘privileges and immuni- 
“ ties ” which Chief Justice Taney’s Court withheld 
from negroes because they were not citizens, but which 
this very same decision now confirms equally to negroes 
and women because they both are citizens. 

And now I come to the practical point of this dis¬ 
cussion. Although the National Constitution, by vir¬ 
tue of the new Amendments, secures to women their 
right of suffrage, yet the Legislature of New York, a 
body which attempted to defeat these Amenc' 1 . nr 
and which defied Congress to declare their ach 
has failed, since their adoption, to conform the .lav 
this state to the amended Supreme Law of the la 
as to protect women, like other citizens, in the t 
ment of their elective franchise. Other states h 
lowed the bad example of New York, and women i 
in them are still deprived of their right of suffr ■ t 
if they attempt to execute it, are subject toobst n. ti 
refusal, or denial by the inspectors of election , a 
remedyfor this wrong, Congress must pass an ; ILi 
the enforcement of these two Amendments in 
of women, just as it did in the case of negroes, 
you remember that after these Amendments wei au vot¬ 
ed, certain of the states affected to despise th( ir \ i. 
ity, and attempted to set at naught the constitutional 
rights thereby guaranteed to dark-skinned as to lighter- 
hued citizens. Accordingly, Congress passed a strin¬ 
gent act (bearing date May 31, 1870), saying : “Itshall 
‘ ‘ be the duty of every officer to give to all citizens of 
“ the United States the same and equal opportunity to 
“become qualified to vote, without distinction of race, 
“color, or previous condition of servitude.” This law, 
exactly as it stands, would be sufficient for the present 
case except that, though it was enacted in behalf of “all 
‘ * citizens, ” it is executed for only one-half. Whatever 


changes are needed to mak.e this, or j&ome similar act, 
as effective for women L &,& foi^^gtde^, I leave to your 
own fruitful and suggestive my clients beg 

that you will introduce your remedy at the beginning 
of the session, so that they may concentrate every 
good influence on its triumph before the winter’s 
end. 

I take this occasion to say that at future elections, 
whether before or after the passage of such an act as I 
ask you to draft, a number of women in this state, pos¬ 
sessing the qualifications requisite for ‘ ‘ electors of 
‘ ‘ the most numerous branch of the state legislature, ” 
and being thereby qualified to vote for members of 
th*> House of Representatives, will go to the polls and 
ait ii >t to vote. In case of their repulse by the officers 
■h • s ge of the ballot-box, they will use their discretion 
,ging suits against those officials, or in enduring 
rther patience the oppression of which they com- 
But you can readily see how many vexatious 
ts maybe avoided if the National government 
prompt to maintain the rights of citizens under 
institution of the United States—the obsolete 
tion of the states to the contrary notwithstanding, 
lear sir, the rapid progress of Woman Suffrage 
land, where all women who own taxable proper- 
equally with men who own the like, fills me 
npatience at the prejudice which still lies as an 
o«. le between the women of America and their po¬ 
litical rights. The next presidential election will be 
one of such interest that thousands of public-spirited 
women will be eager to express their civil wishes con¬ 
cerning it. To withhold from them at such a time a pre¬ 
rogative which they doubly claim,first by natural justice, 
and next by the Federal Constitution, will be unworthy 
of a generous government, and an enlightened age. In 
choosing you to be the champion of their natural and 
constitutional rights, I quote with pleasure the follow¬ 
ing eloquent passage from your speech of March 7, 


17 


1866, as follows : “ I do not hesitate to say that when 
“ the slaves of our country became ‘citizens’ they took 
“ their place in the ‘body-politic’ as a component part 
“ of the ‘ people,’ entitled to equal rights, and under 
“ the protection of these two guardian principles, first, 
“ that all just government stands on the consent of the 
“ governed, and secondly, that taxation without rep- 
‘ ‘ resentation is tyranny ; and these rights it is the du- 
“ ty of Congress to guarantee as essential to the idea 
“ of a republic. ” The doctrine w r hich you have here 
applied to negroes, I ask you to apply to women. You 
will agree with me that it is as sound in the one case 
as in the other. I submit the issue to your native 
sense of justice. Having gilded your name forever by 
your championship of the negro, you have now an op¬ 
portunity to win a companion laurel as a Knight-templar 
for woman’s enfranchisement. Will you render to the 
noble women for whom I speak the chivalrous service of 
introducing into the Senate a swift and strong act to 
enforce the rights of women, as of other ci' ini! 

State of New York, and other states ? 

With mingled pride and love, I am 

Tnr 

The Golden Age, Sept 1, 1871. 








■ ~T ' 









'i 



-4 Weekly Journal devoted to the Free Discussion of all Living 
Questions of Church, Stale, Society, Literature, 

Art, and Moral Beform. 

Published every Wednesday at No. 9 Spruce Stree* 
New York City. 


THEODORE TILTON, 

Editor and Publisher. 

W. T. CLARKE,.Associate Editor. 

0. W. RULAND,.Associate Publisher. 

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Specimen numbers sent free. 

THE GOLDEN AGE TRACTS. 

V ’ ‘ ■ he Rights of Women.” A Letter to Horace Greeley by 

■ ■ ion. 

uE Constitution a Title-Deed to Woman’s Franchise.’* 
■ ; vj. . Charles Sumner by Theodore Tilton. 

Price, $3 per hundred sent to any part of the United States postage 
paid; Single copies, 5 cents. 

All letters should be addressed to THEODORE TILTON, 

Postoffice Box 2848, 
Nevr York City. 

































BIOGRAPHY 


OF 



BY 


THEODORE TILTON 






















victoria QL tOooMjull. 


A Biographical Sketch. 


BY 


THEODORE TILTON. 


M 


"He that uttereth a slander is a fool.” 

—Solomon: Prov. x. 18. 


/ s\X 

/ '•'H ' 

//v> ; 


v />**■■ 
■. -V 




Published at the Office of 

THE GOLDEN AGE 

9 Spruce St., New York. 

1871. 




9 




















Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by Theodore Tilton, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 






0 * 


ME. TILTON’S ACCOUNT OF MRS. WOODHULL. 


‘He that uttereth a slander is a fool.” 

—Solomon: Prov. x. 18. 

I shall swiftly sketch the life of Victoria Claflin 
Woodliull; a young woman whose career has been as 
singular as any heroine’s in a romance; whose ability is 
of a rare and whose character of the rarest type; 
whose personal sufferings are of themselves a whole 
drama of pathos ; whose name (through the malice of 
some and the ignorance of others) has caught a shadow 
in strange contrast with the whiteness of her life; whose 
position as d representative of her sex in the greatest 
reform of modern times renders her an object of pecu¬ 
liar interest to her fellow-citizens ; and whose charac¬ 
ter (inasmuch as I know her well) I can portray with¬ 
out color or tinge from any other partiality save that 
I hold her in uncommon respect. 

In Homer, Ohio, in a small cottage, white-painted and 
• high-peaked, with a porch running round it and a flow¬ 
er garden in front, this daughter, the seventh of ten 
children of Roxana and Buckman Claflin, was born Sep¬ 
tember 23d, 1838. As this was the year when Queen 
Victoria was crowned, the new-born babe, though clad 
neither in purple nor fine linen, but comfortably 
swaddled in respectable poverty, was immediately 
christened (though without chrism) as the Queen’s 
namesake ; her parents little dreaming that their 
daughter would one day aspire to a higher seat 
than the English throne. The Queen, with that 
early matronly predilection which her subsequent 
life did so much to illustrate, foresaw that many glad 
mothers, who were to bring babes into the world during 
that coronation year, would name them after the chief 
lady of the earth ; and accordingly she ordained a gift to 
all her little namesakes of Anno Domini 1838. As Vic- 









4 


toria Claflin was one of these, she has lately been urg¬ 
ed to make a trip to Windsor Castle, to see the illus¬ 
trious giver of these gifts, and to receive the special 
souvenir which the Queen’s bounty is supposed to hold 
still in store for the Ohio babe that uttered its first cry 
as if to say “ Long live the Queen !” Mrs. Woodhull, 
who is now a candidate for the Presidency of the 
United States, should defer this visit till after her elec¬ 
tion, when she will have a beautiful opportunity to 
invite her elder sister in sovereignty—the mother of 
our mother country—to visit her fairest daughter, the 
Bepublic of the West. 

It is pitiful to be a child without a childhood. Such 
was she. Not a sunbeam gilded the morning of her 
life. Her girlish career was a continuous bitterness 
—an unbroken heart-break. She was worked like 
a slave—whipped like a convict. Her father was 
impartial in his cruelty to all his children ; her 
mother, with a fickleness of spirit that renders her one 
of the most erratic of mortals, sometimes abetted him 
in his scourgings, and at other times shielded the little 
ones from his blows. In a barrel of rain-water he kept* 
a number of braided green withes made of willow or 
walnut twig3, and with these stinging weapons, never 
with an ordinary whip, he would cut the quivering flesh 
of the children till their tears and blood melted him into 
mercy. Sometimes he took a handsaw or a stick of fire¬ 
wood as the instrument of his savagery. Coming home 
after the children were in bed, on learning of some 
offence which they had committed, he has been known 
to waken them out of sleep, and to whip them till 
morning. In consequence of these brutalities, one of 
the sons, in his thirteenth year, burst away from home, 
went to sea, and still bears in a shattered constitution 
the damning memorial of his father’s wrath. “ I have 
“ no remembrance of a father’s kiss,” says Victoria. 
Her mother has on occasions tormented and harried her 
children until they would be thrown into spasms, 

f'' 


5 


whereat she would hysterically laugh, clap her hands, and 
look a 3 fiercely delighted as a cat in playing with a mouse. 
At other times, her tenderness toward her offspring 
would appear almost angelic. She would fondle them, 
weep over them, lift her arms and thank God for such 
children, cares 3 them with ecstatic joy, and then smite 
them as if seeking to destroy at a blow both body and 
soul. This eccentric old lady, compounded in equal 
parts of heaven and hell, will pray till her eyes are full 
of tears, and in the same hour curse till her lips are 
white with foam. The father exhibits a more tranquil 
bitterness, with fewer spasms. These parental peculiar¬ 
ities were lately made witnesses against their possessors 
in a court of j ustice. 

If I must account for what seems unaccountable, I 
may say that with these parents, these traits are not 
only constitutional but have been further developed by 
circumstances. The mother, who has never in her life 
learned to read, was during her maidenhood the petted 
heiress of one of the richest German families of Penn¬ 
sylvania, and was brought up not to serve but to be 
served, until in her ignorance and vanity she fancied 
all things her own, and all people her ministers. The fa¬ 
ther, partly bred to the law and partly to real-estate 
speculations, early in life acquired affluence, but 
during Victoria’s third year suddenly lost all that he 
had. gained, and sat down like a beggar in the dust 
of despair. The mother, from her youth, had been a 
religious monomaniac—a spiritualist before the name of 
spiritualism was coined, and before the Bochester 
knockings had noised themselves into the public ear. 
She saw visions and dreamed dreams. During the 
half year preceding Victoria’s birth, the mother be¬ 
came powerfully excited by a religious revival, and 
went through the process known as “sanctification.” 
She would rise in prayer-meetings and pour forth 
passionate hallelujahs that sometimes electrified the 
worshippers. The father, colder in temperament, yet 


6 


equally inclined to the supernatural, was her part¬ 
ner in these excitements. When the stroke of poverty 
felled them to the earth, these exultations were 
quenched in grief. The father, in the opinion of 
some, became partially crazed ; he would take long and 
rapid walks, sometimes of twenty miles, and come home 
with bleeding feet and haggard face. The mother, 
never wholly sane, would huddle her children together 
as a hen her chickens, and wringing her hands above 
them, would pray by the hour that God would protect 
her little brood. Intense melancholy—a misanthropic 
gloom thick as a sea-fog—seized jointly upon both 
their minds, and at intervals ever since has blighted 
them with its mildew. It is said that a fountain can¬ 
not send forth at the same time sweet waters and bitter, 
and yet affection and enmity will proceed from this 
.couple almost at the same moment. At times, they are 
full of craftiness, low cunning, and malevolence; at oth¬ 
er times, they beam with sunshine, sweetness, and sin¬ 
cerity. I have seen many strange people, but the 
strangest of all are the two parents whose commingled 
essence constitutes the spiritual principle of the hero¬ 
ine of this tale. 

Just here, if any one asks, “How is it that such parents 
** should not have reproduced their eccentricities in 
“ their children ?” I answer, “ This is exactly what they 
“ have done.” The whole brood are of the same feath¬ 
er—except Victoria and Tennie. What language shall 
describe them ? Such another family-circle of cats and 
kits, with soft fur and sharp claws, purring at one mo¬ 
ment and fighting the next, never before filled one 
house with their clamors since Babel began. They 
love and hate—they do good and evil—they bless and 
smite each other. They are a sisterhood of furies, tem¬ 
pered with love’s melancholy. Here and there one will 
drop on her knees and invoke God’s vengeance on the 
rest. But for years there has been one common senti¬ 
ment sweetly pervading the breasts of a majority to- 


7 


wards a minority of the offspring, namely, a determina¬ 
tion that Victoria and Tennie should earn all the money 
for the support of the numerous remainder of the Claf- 
lin tribe—wives, husbands, children, servants, and all. 
Being daughters of the horse-leech, they cry “ give.” 
It is the common law of the Claflin clan that the idle 
many shall eat up the substance of the thrifty few. 
Victoria is a green leaf, and her legion of relatives are 
caterpillars who devour her. Their sin is that they 
return no thanks after meat; they curse the hand that 
feeds them. They are what my friend Mr. Greeley 
calls “ a bad crowd.” I am a little rough in saying this, 
I admit; but I have a rude prejudice in favor of the 
plain truth. 

Victoria’s school-days comprised, all told, less than 
three years—stretching with broken intervals between 
her eighth and eleventh. The aptest learner of her 
class, she was the pet alike of scholars and teacher. 
Called “ The Little Queen ” (not only from her name 
but her demeanor) she bore herself with mimic royalty, 
like one bom to command. Fresh and beautiful, her 
countenance being famed throughout the neighborhood 
for its striking spirituality, modest, yet energetic, and 
restive from the over-fulness of an inward energy 
such as quickened the young blood of Joan of Arc, she 
was a child of genius, toil, and grief. The little old 
head on the little young shoulders was often bent over 
her school-book at the midnight hour. Outside of 
the school-room, she was a household drudge, serving 
others so long as they were awake, and serving herself 
only when they slept. Had she been born black, or 
been chained to a cart-wheel in Alabama, she could not 
have been a more enslaved slave. During these school- 
years, child as she was, she was the many-burdened 
maid-of-all-work in the large family of a married sister 5 
she made fires, she washed and ironed, she baked bread, 
she cut wood, she spaded a vegetable garden, she went 
on errands, she tended infants, she did everything. 




8 


“ Yictoria ! Victoria ! ” was the call in the morning be¬ 
fore the cock-crowing ; when, bouncing out of bed, the 
“little steam engine,” as she was styled, began her 
buzzing activities for the day. Light and fleet of step, 
she ran like a deer. She was everybody’s favorite— 
loved, petted, and by some marveled at as a semi-super¬ 
natural being. Only in her own home (not a sweet but 
bitter home) was she treated with the cruelty that still 
beclouds the memory of her early days. 

I must now let out a secret. She acquired her 
studies, performed her work, and lived her life by the 
help (as she believes) of heavenly spirits. From her 
childhood till now (having reached her thirty-third 
year) her anticipation of the other world has been more 
vivid than her realization of this. She has entertained 
angels, and not unawares. These gracious guests have 
been her constant companions. They abide with her 
night and day. They dictate her life with daily reve¬ 
lation ; and like St. Paul, she is “not disobedient to the 
“ heavenly vision.” She goes and comes at their be¬ 
hest. Her enterprises are not the coinage of her own 
brain, but of their divine invention. Her writings and 
speeches are the products, not only of their indwelling 
in her soul, but of their absolute control of her 
brain and tongue. Like a good Greek of the olden 
time, she does nothing without consulting her oracles. 
Never, as she avers, have they deceived her, nor 
ever will she neglect their decrees. One-third of hu¬ 
man life is passed in sleep ; and in her case, a goodly 
fragment of this third is spent in trance. Seldom a day 
goes by but she enters into this fairy-land, or rather into 
this spirit-realm. In pleasant weather, she has a habit 
of sitting on the roof of her stately mansion on Murray 
Hill, and there communing hour by hour with the 
spirits. She as a religious devotee—her simple theol¬ 
ogy being an absorbing faith in God and the angels. 

Moreover, I may as well mention here as later, that 
every characteristic utterance which she gives to the 


9 


world is dictated while under spirit-influence, and most 
often in a totally unconscious state. The words that 
fall from her lips are garnered by the swift pen of her 
husband, and published almost verbatim as she gets and 
gives them. To take an illustration, after her recent nom¬ 
ination to the Presidency by “ The Victoria League,” 
she sent to that committee a letter of superior dig¬ 
nity and moral weight. It was a composition which 
she had dictated while so outwardly oblivious to the 
dictation, that when she ended and awoke, she had no 
memory at all of what she had just done. The product 
of that strange and weird mood was a beautiful piece of 
English, not unworthy of Macaulay ; and to prove 
what I say, I adduce the following eloquent passage, 
which (I repeat) was published without change as 
it fell from her unconscious lips : 

“I ought not to pass unnoticed,” she says, “your 
‘ ‘ courteous and graceful allusion to what you deem the 
“ favoring omen of my name. It is true that a Victoria 
4 ‘ rules the great rival nation opposite to us on the other 
‘ ‘ shore of the Atlantic, and it might grace the amity just 
‘ ‘ sealed between the two nations, and be a new secur¬ 
ity of peace, if a twin sisterhood of Victorias were to 
“preside over the two nations. It is true, also, that in 
“its mere etymology the namesignifi.es Victory ! and the 
‘ ‘ victory for the right is what we are bent on securing. 
“ It is again true, also, that to some minds there is a 
“ consonant harmony between the idea and the word, 
“so that its euphonious utterance seems to their imagin- 
‘ ‘ ations to be itself a genius of success. However this 
‘ £ may be, I have sometimes imagined that there 
‘ ‘ is perhaps something providential and prophetic in 
“ the fact that my parents were prompted to confer on 
“ me a name which forbids the very thought of failure ; 
£ 4 and, as the great Napoleon believed the star of his 
4 ‘ destiny, you will at least excuse me, and charge it to 
“the credulity of the woman, if I believe also in fatality 
“ of triumph as somehow inhering in my name.” 


10 


In quoting this passage, I wish to add that its author 
is a person of no special literary training ; indeed, so 
averse to the pen that, of her own will, she rarely dips it 
into ink, except to sign her business autograph ; nor 
would she ever write at all except for those spirit- 
promptings which she dare not disobey ; and she could 
not possibly have produced the above peroration except 
by some strange intellectual quickening—some over¬ 
brooding moral help. This (as she says) she derives 
from the spirit-world. One of her texts is, “I will lift 
“ up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help— 

‘ * my help cometh from the Lord who made Heaven and 
“Earth.” She reminds me of the old engraving of 
St. Gregory dictating his homilies under the outspread 
wing of the Holy Dove. 

It has been so from her childhood. So that her 
school studies were, literally, a daily miracle. She 
would glance at a page, and know it by heart. The 
tough little mysteries which bother the bewildered 
brains of country-school dullards were always to her as 
vivid as the sunshine. And when sent on long and 
weary errands, she believes that she has been lifted 
over the ground by her angelic helpers—“lest she 
“ should dash her feet against a stone. ” When she had 
too heavy a basket to carry, an unseen hand would 
sometimes carry it for her. Digging in the garden as 
if her back would break, occasionally a strange restful¬ 
ness would refresh her, and she knew that the spirits 
were toiling in her stead. All this may seem an illu¬ 
sion to everybody else, but will never be other than 
a reality to her. 

Let me cite some details of these spiritual phe¬ 
nomena, curious in themselves, and illustrating the 
forces that impel her career. 

“My spiritual vision,” she says, “dates back as ear¬ 
ly as my third year. ” In Victoria’s birth place, a young 
woman named Hachel Scribner, about twenty-five 
years of age, who had been Victoria’s nurse, suddenly 


11 


died. On the day of her death, Victoria was picked 
up by her departing spirit, and borne off into the 
spirit-world. To this day Mrs. Woodhull describes vi¬ 
vidly her childish sensations as she felt herself glid¬ 
ing through the air—like St. Catharine winged away by 
the angels. Her mother testifies that while this scene 
was enacting to the child’s inner consciousness, her 
little body lay as if dead for three hours. 

Two of her sisters, who had died in childhood, were 
constantly present with her. She would talk to them 
as a girl tattles to her dolls. They were her most fas¬ 
cinating playmates, and she never cared for any others 
while she had their invisible society. 

In her tenth year, one day while sitting by the side 
of a cradle rocking a sick babe to sleep, she says that 
two angels came, and gently pushing her away, began 
to fan the child with their white hands, until its face 
grew fresh and rosy. Her mother then suddenly en¬ 
tered the chamber, and beheld in amazement the 
little nurse lying in a trance on the floor, her face turn¬ 
ed upward toward the ceiling, and the pining babe ap¬ 
parently in the bloom of health. 

The chief among her spiritual visitants, and one who 
has been a majestic guardian to her from the earliest 
years of her remembrance, she describes as a maturfed 
man of stately figure, clad in a Greek tunic, solemn and 
graceful in his aspect, strong in his influence, and al¬ 
together dominant over her life. For many years, not¬ 
withstanding an almost daily visit to her vision, he 
withheld his name, nor would her most importunate 
questionings induce him to utter it. But he always prom¬ 
ised that in due time he would reveal his identity. Mean¬ 
while he prophecied to her that she would rise to great 
distinction ; that she would emerge from her poverty 
and live in a stately house ; that she would win great 
wealth in a city which he pictured as crowded with 
ships ; that she would publish and conduct a journal; 
and that finally, to crown her career, she would be- 



12 


come the ruler of her people. At length, after patient¬ 
ly waiting on this spirit-guide for twenty years, one day 
in 1868, during a temporary sojourn in Pittsburgh, and 
while she was sitting at a marble table, he suddenly ap¬ 
peared to her, and wrote on the table in English letters 
the name “ Demosthenes. ” At first the writing was in¬ 
distinct, but grew to such a luster that the brightness 
filled the room. The apparition, familiar as it had been 
before, now affrighted her to trembling. The stately 
and commanding spirit told her to journey to New York, 
where she would find at No. 17 Great Jones street a 
house in readiness for her, equipped in all things to her 
use and taste. She unhesitatingly obeyed, although 
she never before had heard of Great Jones street, nor 
until that revelatory moment had entertained an in¬ 
tention of taking such a residence. On entering the 
house, it fulfilled in reality the picture which she saw of 
it in her vision—the self-same hall, stairways, rooms, 
and furniture. Entering with some bewilderment into 
the library, she reached out her hand by chance, and 
without knowing what she did, took up a book which, 
on idly looking at its title, she saw (to her blood-chilling 
astonishment) to be “The Orations of Demosthenes.” 
Erom that time onward, the Greek statesman has been 
even more palpably than in her earlier years her pro¬ 
phetic monitor, mapping out the l\fe which she must 
follow, as a chart for a ship sailing the sea. She be¬ 
lieves him to be her familiar spirit—the author of her 
public policy, and the inspirer of her published words. 
Without intruding my own opinion as to the authen¬ 
ticity of this inspiration, I have often thought that if 
Demosthenes could arise and speak English, he could 
hardly excel the fierce light and heat of some of the 
sentences which I have heard from this singular woman 
in her glowing hours. 

I now turn back to her first marriage. The bride (piti¬ 
ful to tell) was in her fourteenth year, the bridegroom in 
his twenty-eighth. It was a fellowship of misery—and 


13 


her parents, who abetted it, ought to have prevented it. 
The Haytians speak of escaping out of the river by 
leaping into the sea. From the endurable cruelty of 
her parents, she fled to the unendurable cruelty of her 
husband. She had been from her twelfth to her four¬ 
teenth year a double victim, first to chills and fever, and 
then to rheumatism, which had jointly played equal 
havoc with her beauty and health, until she was brought 
within a step of “ the iron door.” Dr. Canning Wood- 
hull, a gay rake, but whose habits were kept hid from 
Tier under the general respectability of his family con¬ 
nections (his father being an eminent judge, and his 
uncle the mayor of New York), was professionally sum¬ 
moned to visit the child, and being a trained physician 
arrested her decline. Something about her artless 
manners and vivacious mind captivated his fancy. 
Coming as a prince, he found her as Cinderella—a 
child of the ashes. Before she entirely recovered, and 
while looking haggard and sad, one day he stopped her 
in the street, and said, “My little chick, I want you 
“ to go with me to the pic-nic ”—referring to a projected 
Fourth of July excursion then at hand. The promise 
of a little pleasure acted like a charm on the house- 
worn and sorrow-stricken child. She obtained her 
mother’s assent to her going, but her father coupled it 
with the condition that she should first earn money 
enough to buy herself a pair of shoes. So the little 
fourteen-year-old drudge became for the nonce an apple- 
merchant, and with characteristic business energy- 
sold her apples and bought her shoes. She went to the 
pic-nic with Dr. Woodhull,like a ticket-of-leave juvenile- 
delinquent on a furlough. On coming home from the 
festival, the brilliant fop who, tired of the demi-monde 
ladies whom he could purchase for his pleasure anu in¬ 
spired with a sudden and romantic interest in this art¬ 
less maid, said to her, “ My little puss, tell your father 
“and mother that I want you for a wife.” The 
startled girl quivered with anger at this announcement, 


14 


and with timorous speed fled to her mother and repeated 
the tale, feeling as if some injury was threatened her, 
and some danger impended. But the parents, as if not 
unwilling to be rid of a daughter whose sorrow was 
ripening her into a woman before her time, were de¬ 
lighted at the unexpected offer. They thought it a 
grand match. They helped the young man’s suit, and 
augmented their persecutions of the child. Ignorant, 
innocent, and simple, the girl’s chief thought of the 
proffered marriage was as an escape from the parental 
yoke. Four months later she accepted the change 
—flying from the ills she had to others that she 
knew not of. Her captor, once possessed of his treas¬ 
ure, ceased to value it. On the third night after 
taking his child-wife to his lodgings, he broke her 
heart by remaining away all night at a house of ill-re¬ 
pute. Then for the first time she learned, to her dis¬ 
may, that he was habitually unchaste, and given to 
long fits of intoxication. She was stung to the quick. 
The shock awoke all her womanhood. She grew ten 
years older in a single day. A tumult of thoughts swept 
like a whirlwind through her mind, ending at last in one 
predominant purpose, namely, to reclaim her husband. 
She set herself religiously to this pious task—calling 
on God and the spirits to help her in it. 

Six weeks after her marriage (during which time her 
husband was mostly with his cups and his mistresses), 
she discovered a letter addressed to him in a lady’s ele¬ 
gant penmanship, saying, “Did you marry that child 
“ because she too was en famille? ” This was an addi¬ 
tional thunderbolt. The fact was that her husband, on 
the day of his marriage, had sent away into the coun¬ 
try a mistress who a few months later gave birth to 
a child. 

Squandering his money like a prodigal, he suddenly 
put his wife into the humblest quarters, where, left 
mostly to herself, she dwelt in bitterness of spirit, 
aggravated from time to time by learning of his order- 


15 


ing baskets of champagne and drinking himself drunk 
in the company of harlots. 

Sometimes, with uncommon courage, through rain 
and sleet, half clad and shivering, she would track him 
to his dens, and by the energy of her spirit compel him 
to return. At other times, all night long she would 
watch at the window, waiting for his footsteps, until 
she heard them languidly shuffling along the pavement 
with the staggering reel of a drunken man,in the shame¬ 
less hours of the morning. 

During all this time, she passionately prayed Heaven 
to give her the heart of her husband, but Heaven, de¬ 
creeing otherwise, withheld it from her, and for her 
good. 

In fifteen months after her marriage, while living in a 
little low frame-house in Chicago, in the dead of winter, 
with icicles clinging to her bed-post, and attended only 
by her half-drunken husband, she brought forth in al¬ 
most mortal agony her first-born child. In her ensuing 
helplessness, she became an object of pity to a next-door 
neighbor who, with a kindness which the sufferer’s 
unhomelike home did not afford, brought her day by 
day some nourishing dish. This same ministering 
hand would then wrap the babe in a blanket, and take it 
to a happier mother in the near neighborhood, who was 
at the same time nursing a new-born son. In this 
way Victoria and her child—themselves both children— 
were cared for with mingled gentleness and neglect. 

At the end of six days, the little invalid attempted to 
rise and put her sick-room in order, when she was 
taken with delirium, during which her mother visited 
her just in time to save her life. 

On her recovery, and after a visit to her father’s 
house, she returned to her own to be horror-struck at 
discovering that her bed had been occupied the night be¬ 
fore by her husband in company with a wanton of the 
streets, and that the room was littered with the remains 
of thei" drunken feast. 



16 


Once, after a month’s desertion by him, nntil she 
had no money and little to eat, she learned that he was 
keeping a mistress at a fashionable boarding-house, 
under the title of wife. The true wife, still wrest¬ 
ling with God for the renegade, sallied forth into 
the wintry street, clad in a calico dress without under¬ 
garments, and shod only with india-rubbers without 
shoes or stockings, entered the house, confronted the 
household as they sat at table, told her story to the con¬ 
fusion of the paramour and his mistress, and drew tears 
from all the company till, by a common movement, the 
listeners compelled the harlot to pack her trunk and 
flee the city, and shamed the husband into creeping 
like a spaniel back into the kennel which his wife still 
cherished as her home. 

To add to her misery she discovered that her child, 
begotten in drunkenness, and bom in squalor, was a 
half idiot; predestined to be a hopeless imbecile for life ; 
endowed with just enough intelligence to exhibit the 
light of reason in dim eclipse :—a sad and pitiful spec¬ 
tacle in his mother’s house to-day, where he roams from 
room to room, muttering noises more sepulchral than 
human ; a daily agony to the woman who bore him, 
hoping more of her burden; and heightening the pathos 
of the perpetual scene by the uncommon sweetness of 
his temper which, by winning every one’s love, doubles 
every one’s pity. 

Journeying to California as a region where she might 
inspire her husband to begin a new life freed from old 
associations, she there found herself and her little fam¬ 
ily strangers in a strange city—beggars in a land of 
plenty. Change of sky is not change of mind. Dr. 
Woodhull took his habits, his wife took her necessi¬ 
ties, and both took their misery, from East to West. 
In San Francisco, the girlish woman, with unrelaxed 
energy, and as part of that life-long heroism 
which will one day have its monument, set herself to 
supporting the man by whom she ought to have been 


17 


supported. A morning journal had an advertisement— 
“A cigar girl wanted.” The wife, with her face of 
sweet sixteen, presented herself as the first candidate, 
and was accepted on the spot. The proprietor was a 
stalwart Californian—one of those men who catch from 
a new country something of the liberality which the 
sailor brings from the sea. She served for one day be¬ 
hind his counter—blushing, modest, and sensitive, her 
ears tingling at every rude remark by every uncouth cus¬ 
tomer—and at nightfall her employer, who had noticed 
the blood coming and going in her cheeks, said to her, 
“My little lady, you are not the clerk I want; I must 
“have somebody who can rough it; you are too fine.” 
Inquiring into her case, he was surprised to find her 
married and a mother. At first he discredited this in¬ 
formation, but there was no denying the truth of her 
story. He accompanied her to her husband, and as the 
two men discovered themselves to each other as brother 
free-masons, he gave his fair clerk of a day a twenty- 
dollar gold piece, and dismissed her with his blessing. 
And I hope this has been revisited on his own head. 

Resorting t o her needle, she carried from house to h ouse 
this only weapon which many women possess wherewith 
to fight the battle of life. She chanced to come upon 
Anna Cogswell, the actress, who wanted a sempstress to 
make her a theatrical wardrobe. The winsome dress¬ 
maker was engaged at once. But her earnings at this 
new calling did not keep pace with her expenses. “It 
“is no use, ” said she to her dramatic friend ; “I amrun- 
“ning behindhand. I must do something better.” 
“ Then,” replied the actress, “you too must be an ac- 
“ tress. ” And, nothing loth to undertake anything new 
and difficult, Victoria, who never before had dreamed of 
such a possibility, was engaged as a lesser light to the 
Cogswell star. For a first appearance, she was cast in the 
part of the “Country Cousin” in “New York by Gas¬ 
light.” The text was given to her in the morning, 
she learned and rehearsed it during the day, and made 


18 


a fair liit in it at niglit. For six weeks thereafter, she 
earned fifty-two dollars a week as an actress. 

“Never leave the stage,” said some of her fellow-per¬ 
formers, all of whom admired her simplicity and spirit¬ 
uality. “But I do not care for the stage,” she said, 

“ and I shall leave it at the first opportunity. I am 
“ meant for some other fate. But what it is, I know 
“not.” 

It came—as all things have came to her—through the 
agency of spirits. One night while on the boards, clad 
in a pink silk dress and slippers, acting in the ball¬ 
room scene in the “Corsican Brothers,” suddenly a 
spirit-voice addressed her, saying, “Victoria, come 
“home!” Thrown instantly into clairvoyant con¬ 
dition, she saw a vision of her young sister Ten- J 
nie, then a mere child—standing by her mother, 
and both calling the absent one to return. Her 
mother and Tennie were then in Columbus, Ohio. 

She saw Tennie distinctly enough to notice that she 
wore a striped French calico frock. “Victoria come 
“ home!” said the little messenger, beckoning with 
her childish forefinger. The apparition would not 
be denied. Victoria, thrilled and chilled by the vision 
and voice, burst away at a bound behind the scenes, 
find without waiting to change her dress, ran, clad with 
all her dramatic adornments, through a foggy rain to her 
hotel, and packing up her few things that night, betook 
herself with her husband and child next morning 
to the steamer bound for New York. On the voyage 
she was thrown into such vivid spiritual states, 
that she produced a profound excitement among 
the passengers. On reaching her mother’s home, 
she came upon Tennie dressed in the same 
dress as in the vision ; and on inquiring the mean¬ 
ing of the message, “Victoria, come home!” was 
told that at the time it was uttered, her mother had 
said to Tennie, “ My dear, send the spirits after Vic- 
“ toria to bring her home” ; and moreover the French 


19 


calico dress had appeared to her spirit-sight at the very 
first moment its wearer had put it on. 

This homeward trip, and its consequences, marked a 
new phase in her career—a turning point in her life. 

Hitherto her clairvoyant faculty had been put to no 
pecuniary use, but she was now directed by the spirits 
to repair to Indianapolis, there to announce herself as 
a medium, and to treat patients for the cure of disease. 
Taking rooms in the Bates House, and publishing a 
card in the journals, she found herself able, on saluting 
her callers, to tell by inspiration their names, their res¬ 
idences, and their maladies. In a few days she became 
the town’s talk. Her marvellous performances in 
clairvoyance being noised abroad, people flocked to her 
from a distance. Her rooms were crowded and her 
purse grew fat. She reaped a golden harvest—includ¬ 
ing, as its worthiest part, golden opinions from all sorts 
of people. Her countenance would often glow as with 
a sacred light, and she became an object of religious 
awe to many wonder-stricken people whose inward lives 
she had revealed. Moreover, her unpretentious modesty, 
and her perpetual disclaimer of any merit or power of 
her own, and the entire crediting of this to spirit-influ¬ 
ence, augmented the interest with which all spectators 
regarded the amiable prodigy. First at Indianapolis, 
and afterward at Terre Haute, she wrought some ap¬ 
parently miraculous cures. She straightened the feet 
of the lame ; she opened the ears of the deaf; she de¬ 
tected the robbers of a bank ; she brought to light hid¬ 
den crimes ; she solved physiological problems ; she 
unveiled business secrets; she prophecied future events. 
Knowing the wonders which she wrought, certain citi¬ 
zens disguised themselves and came to her purporting 
to be strangers from a distant town, but she instantly 
said, “Oh, no; you all live here.” “How can you 
“ tell ?” they asked. “ The spirits say so,” she replied. 

Benedictions followed her ; gifts were lavished upon 
her ; money flowed in a stream toward her. Joumeying 


20 


from city to city in the practice of her spiritual art, she 
thereby supported all her relatives far and near. Her 
income in one year reached nearly a hundred thousand 
dollars. She received in one day, simply as fees for cures 
which she had wrought, five thousand dollars. The sum 
total of the receipts of her practice, and of her investments 
growing out of it, up to the time of its discontinuance 
by direction of the spirits in 1869, was $700,000. The 
age of wonders has not ceased ! 

During all this period, though outwardly prosperous, 
she was inwardly wretched. The dismal fact of her 
son’s half-idiocy so preyed upon her mind that, in a 
heat of morbid feeling, she fell to accusing her inno¬ 
cent self for his misfortunes. The sight of his face re¬ 
buked her, until, in brokenness of spirit, she prayed to 
God for another child—a daughter, to be born with a 
fair body and a sound mind. Her prayer was granted, 
but not without many accompaniments of inhumanity. 
Once during her carriage of her unborn charge, she 
was kicked by its father in a fit of drunkenness—inflict¬ 
ing a bruise on her body and a greater bruise to her spir¬ 
it. Profound as her double suffering was, in its lowest 
depth there was a deeper still. She was plunged into this 
at the child’s birth. This event occurred at No. 53 Bond 
Street, New York, April 23d, 1861. She and her hus¬ 
band were at the time the only occupants of the house 
—her trial coming upon her while no nurse, or servant, 
or other human helper was under the roof. The 
babe entered the world at four o’clock in the morning, 
handled by the feverish and unsteady hands of its in¬ 
toxicated father, who, only half in possession of his 
professional skill, cut the umbilical cord too near the 
flesh and tied it so loose that the string came off—laid 
the babe in its mother’s arms—in an hour afterward left 
them asleep and alone—and then staggered out of the 
house. Nor did he remember to return. Meanwhile, 
the mother, on waking, was startled to find that her 
head on the side next to her babe’s body was in a pool 


of blood—that her hair was soaked and clotted in a 
little red stream oozing- drop by drop from the bowels of 
the child. In her motherly agony, reaching a broken 
chair-rung which happened to be lying near, she 
pounded against the wall to summon help from the 
next house. At intervals for several hours she con¬ 
tinued this pounding, no one answering—until at 
length one of the neighbors, a resolute woman, who 
was attracted toward the noise, but unable to get in at 
the front-door, removed the grating of the basement, 
and made her way up stairs to the rescue of the mother 
and her babe. On the third day after, the mother, 
on sitting propped in her bed and looking out of the 
window, caught sight of her husband staggering up the 
steps of a house across the way, mistaking it for his 
own ! 

It was this horrible experience that first awoke her 
mind to the question, “Why should I any longer 
“live with this man ?” Hitherto she had entertained 
an almost superstitious idea of the devotion with 
which a wife should cling to her husband. She had 
always been so faithful to him that, in his cups, he 
would mock and jeer at her fidelity, and call her a fool 
for maintaining it. At length the fool grew wiser, and 
after eleven years of what, with conventional mockery, 
was called a marriage—during which time her husband 
had never spent an evening with her at home, had 
seldom drawn a sober breath, and had spent on other 
women, not herself, all the money he had ever earned— 
she applied in Chicago for a divorce, and obtained it. 

Previous to this crisis, there had occurred a remarka¬ 
ble incident which more than ever confirmed her 
faith in the guardianship of spirits. One day, 
during a severe illness of her son, she left him to 
visit her patients, and on her return was startled with 
tlinews that the boy had died two hours before. 
“No,” she exclaimed, “I will not permit his death.” 
And with frantic energy she stripped her bosom naked, 


22 


caught up his lifeless form, pressed it to her own, and 
sitting thus, flesh to flesh, glided insensibly into a trance 
in which she remained seven hours; at the end of which 
time she awoke, a perspiration started from his clammy 
skin, and the child that had been thought dead was 
brought back again to life—and lives to this day in sad 
half-death. It i3 her belief that the spirit of Jesu3 Christ 
brooded over the lifeless form, and re-wrought the 
miracle of Lazarus for a sorrowing woman’s sake. 

Victoria’s father and mother, growing still more fa¬ 
natical with their advancing years, had all along sub¬ 
jected her to a series of singular vexations. And 
the elder sisters had j oined in the mischief-making, out¬ 
doing the parents. Sometimes they would burst in upon 
Mrs. Woodhull’s house, and attempt to govern its inter¬ 
nal economy; sometimes they would carry off the fur¬ 
niture, or garments, cr pictures; sometimes they would 
crown her with eulogies as the greatest of human be¬ 
ings, and in the same breath defame her as an agent of 
the devil. 

But their great cause of persecution grew out of her 
younger sister Tennie’s career. This young woman de¬ 
veloped, while a child in her father’s house, a similar 
power to Victoria’s. It was a penetrating spiritual in¬ 
sight applied to the cure of disease. But her father and 
mother, who regarded their daughter in the light of 
the damsel mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, who 
“brought her masters much gain by soothsaying,” 
put her before the public as a fortune-teller. By add¬ 
ing to much that was genuine in her mediumship 
more that was charlatanry, they aroused against this 
fraudulent business the indignation of the sincere soul 
of Victoria who, more than most human beings, scorns 
a lie, and would burn at the stake rather than prac¬ 
tise a deceit. She clutched Tennie as by main force 
and flung her out of this semi-humbug, to the mingled 
astonishment of her money-greedy family, one and all. 
At this time Tennie was supporting a dozen or twenty 



( 


23 


relatives by her ill-gotten gains. Victoria’s rescue of 
her excited the wrath of all these parasites—which has 
continued hot and undying against both to this day. 
The fond and fierce mother alternately loves and hates 
the two united defiers of her morbid will; and the father, 
at times a Mephistopheles, waits till the inspiration of 
cunning overmasters his parental instinct, and watch¬ 
ing for a moment when his ill word to a stranger will 
blight their business schemes, drops in upon some cap¬ 
italist whose money is in their hands, lodges an indict¬ 
ment against his own flesh and blood, takes out his 
handkerchief to hide a few well-feigned tears, clasps his 
hands with an unfelt agony, hobbles off smiling sardon¬ 
ically at the mischief which he has done, and the next 
day repents his wickedness with genuine contrition and 
mangier woe. These parents would cheerfully give 
the/ir lives as a sacrifice to atone for the many mischiefs 
which they have cast like burrs at their children ; but 
jlf all the scars which they and their progeny have in¬ 
flicted on one another could be magically healed to¬ 
day, they would be scratched open by the same hands 
and set stinging and tingling anew to-morrow. 

There is a maxim that marriages are made in heaven,’ 
albeit contradicted by the Scripture which declares that 
in heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in mar¬ 
riage. But, even against the Scripture, it is safe to say 
that Victoria’s second marriage was made in Heaven ; 
that is, it was decreed by the self-same spirits whom she 
is ever ready to follow, whether they lead her for disci¬ 
pline into the valley of the shadow of death, or for com¬ 
fort in those ways of pleasantness which are paths of 
peace. Col. James H. Blood, commander of the 6th 
Missouri Regiment, who at the close of the war was 
elected City Auditor of St. Louis, who became President 
of the Society of Spiritualists in that place, and who had 
himself been,like Victoria,the legal partner of a morally 
sundered marriage, called one day on Mrs. Woodhull to 
consult her as a spiritualistic physician (having never 







24 


met her before), and was startled to see her pass into a 
trance, during which she announced, unconsciously to 
herself, that his future destiny was to be linked with 
hers in marriage. Thus, to their mutual amazement, 
but to their subsequent happiness, they were betrothed 
on the spot by ‘ * the powers of the air. ” The legal tie by 
which at first they bound themselves to each other was af¬ 
terward by mutual consent annulled—the necessary form 
of Illinois law being complied with to this effect. But the 
marriage stands on its merits, and is to all who witness 
its harmony known to be a sweet and accordant union 
of congenial souls. 

Col. Blood is a man of a philosophic and reflective 
cast of mind, an enthusiastic student of the higher lore 
of spiritualism, a recluse from society, and afihexpect- 
ant believer in a stupendous destiny for Victoria-. A 
modesty not uncommon to men of intellect prompts him 
to sequester his name in the shade rather than to set it 
glittering in the sun. But he is an indefatigable' 
worker—driving his pen through all hours of the day 
and half of the night. He is an active editor of Wood 
hull & Clajlin's Weekly , end one of the busy partne 
in the firm of Woodhull, Claflin & Co., Brokers, at 
Broad street, New York. His civic views are (to 
his favorite designation of them) cosmopolitical; 
other words, he is a radical of extreme radicalism- 
internationalist of the most uncompromising t 
—a communist who would rather have died in 1 
than be the president of a pretended republic w v 
first official act has been the judicial murder of the 
republicans in France. His spiritualistic habits 
describes in a letter to his friend, the writer of this 
morial, as follows : “At about eleven or twelve o’cl 
“ at night, two or three times a week, and someth 
“ without nightly interval, Victoria and I hold par 
“ ment with the spirits. It is by this kind of stut 
“that we both have learned nearly all the valua. 
“knowledge that we possess. Victoria goes ink 






25 


“ trance, during which her guardian spirit takes control 
“of her mind, speaking audibly through her lips, pro- 
44 pounding various matters for our subsequent investi- 
“gation and verification, and announcing principles, 
“ detached thoughts, hints of systems, and suggestions 
“for affairs. In this way, and in this spiritualnight- 
“ school, began that process of instruction by which 
“ Victoria has risen to her present position as a political 
“ economist and politician. During her entranced 
“ state, which generally lasts about an hour, but some¬ 
times twice as long, I make copious notes of all she 
“ says, and when her speech is unbroken, I write down 
“every word, and publish it without correction or 
“ amendment. She and I regard all the other portion 
‘ 4 of our lives as almost valueless compared with these 
“ midnight hours. ” The preceding extract shows that 
this fine-grained transcendentalist is a reverent husband 
to his spiritual wife, the sympathetic companion 
of her entranced moods, and their faithful historian to 
the world. 

After her union with Col. Blood, instead of changing 
her name to his, she followed the example of many 
actresses, singers, and other professional women whose 
names have become a business property to their owners, 
and she still continues to be known as Mrs. Wood- 
hull. 

One night, about half a year after their marriage, she 
and her husband were wakened at midnight in Cincin¬ 
nati by the announcement that a man by the name of 
Dr. Woodhull had been attacked with delirium tremens 
at the Burnet House, and in a lucid moment had spoken 
of the woman from whom he had been divorced, and beg¬ 
ged to see her. Col. Blood immediately took a carriage, 
drove to the hotel, brought the wretched victim home, 
and jointly with Victoria took care of him with life-sav¬ 
ing kindness for six weeks. On his going away they 
gave him a few hundred dollars of their joint proper¬ 
ty to make him comfortable in another city. He depart- 







26 


ed full of gratitude, bearing with him the assurance that 
he would always be welcome to come and go as a friend 
of the family. And from that day to this, the poor man, 
dilapidated in body and emasculated in spirit, has some¬ 
times sojourned under Victoria’s roof and sometimes else¬ 
where, according to his whim or will. In the present 
ruins of the young gallant of twenty years ago, there is 
more manhood (albeit an expiring spark like a pan die 
at its socket) than during any of the former years; and 
to be now turned out of doors by the woman whom he 
wronged, but who would not wrong him in return, would 
be an act of inhumanity which it would be impossible 
for Mrs. Woodhull and Col. Blood either jointly or 
separately to commit. For this piece of noble conduct 
—what is commonly called her living with two husbands 
under one roof—she has received not so much censure 
on earth as I think she will receive reward in heaven. 
No other passage of her life more signally illustrates 
the nobility of her moral judgments, or the supernal 
courage with which she stands by her convictions. Not 
all the clamorous tongues in Christendom, though they 
should simultaneously cry out against her “ Fie, for 
shame!” could persuade her to turn this wretched wreck 
from her home. And I say she is right; and I will 
maintain this opinion against the combined Pecksniffs 
of the whole world. 

This act, and the malice of enemies, together with 
her bold opinions on social questions, have combined 
to give her reputation a stain. But no slander 
ever fell on any human soul with greater injustice. A 
more unsullied woman does not walk the earth. She 
carries in her very face the fair legend of a character 
kept pure by a sacred fire within. She is one of those 
aspiring devotees who tread the earth merely as a 
stepping-stone to Heaven, and whose chief ambition 
is finally to present herself at the supreme tribunal 
“spotless, and without wrinkle, or blemish, or any 
“such thing.” Knowing her as well as I do, I cannot 


27 


hear an accusation against her without recalling Tenny¬ 
son’s line of King Arthur, 

“ Is thy white blamelessness accounted blame ?” 

Fulfilling a previous prophecy, and following a celes¬ 
tial mandate, in 1889 she founded a bank and publish¬ 
ed a journal. These two events took the town by storm. 
When the doors of her office in Broad street were first 
thrown open to the public, several thousand visitors came 
in a flock on the first day. The “ lady brokers, ” as they 
were called (a strange confession that brokers are not 
always gentlemen) were beseiged like lionesses in a 
cage. The daily press interviewed them ; the weekly 
wits satirized them ; the comic sheets caricatured 
them; but like a couple of fresh young dolphins, 
breasting the sea side by side, they showed themselves 
native to the element, and cleft gracefully every 
threatening wave that broke over their heads. The 
breakers could not dash the brokers. Indomitable 
in their energy, the sisters won the good graces of 
Commodore Vanderbilt—a fine old gentleman of com- 
l fortable means, who of all the lower animals prefers the 
horse, and of all the higher virtues admires pluck. Both 
with and without Commodore Vanderbilt’s help, Mrs. 
Woodhull has more than once shown the pluck that has 
held the rein of the stock market as the Commodore 
holds his horse. Her journal, as one sees it week by 
week, is generally a willow-basket full of audacious 
manuscripts, apparently picked up at random and 
! thrown together pell-mell, stunning the reader with 
a medley of politics, finance, free-love, and the pan- 
tarchy. This sheet, when the divinity that shapes 
its ends shall begin to add to the rough-hewing a little 
smooth-shaping; in other words, when its unedited 
chaos shall come to be moulded by the spirits to that 
order which is Heaven’s first law ; this not ordinary 
but “cardinary” journal, which is edited in one world, 
and published in another, will become less a confusion 
i to either, and more a power for both. 



28 


In 1870, following the English plan of self-nomina¬ 
tion, Mrs. Woodhull announced herself as a candidate 
for the Presidency—mainly for the purpose of drawing 
public attention to the claims of woman to political 
equality with man. She accompanied this announce¬ 
ment with a series of papers in the Herald on politics 
and finance, which have since been collected into a 
volume entitled “ The Principles of Government.” She 
has lately received a more formal nomination to that 
high ofnco by “ The Victoria League,” an organization 
which, being somewhat Jacobinical in its secrecy, is 
popularly supposed, though not definitely known, to be 
presided over by Commodore Vanderbilt, who is also 
similarly imagined to be the golden corner-stone of the 
business house of Woodhull, Claflin & Co. Should she 
be elected to the high seat to which she aspires, (an 
event concerning which I make no prophecy.) I am at 
least sure that she would excel any Queen now on any 
throne in her native faculty to govern others. 

One night in December, 1869, while she lay in deep 
sleep, her Greek guardian came to her, and sitting trans¬ 
figured by her couch, wrote on a scroll (so that she 
could not only see the words, but immediately dictated 
them to her watchful amanuensis) the memorable doc¬ 
ument now known in history as “The Memorial of 
“Victoria C. "Woodhull”—a petition addressed to 
Congress, claiming under the Fourteenth Amendment 
the right of women as of other “citizens of the 
“United States” to vote in “the States wherein they 
“reside”—asking, moreover, that the State of New York, 
of which she was a citizen, should be restrained byFeder- 
al authority from preventing her exercise of this con¬ 
stitutional right. A3 up to this time neither she nor 
her husband had been greatly interested in woman 
suffrage, ho had no sooner written this manifesto from 
her lip3, than ho awoke her from the trance, and protest¬ 
ed against the communication as nonsense, believing it 
to be a trick of some evil-disposed spirits. In the mom- 


' NJ 


29 


ing tlie document was shown to a number of friends, 
including one eminent judge, who ridiculed its logic 
and conclusions. But the lady herself, from whose 
sleeping and yet unsleeping brain the strange document 
had sprung like Minerva from the head of Jove, sim¬ 
ply answered that her antique instructor, having never 
misled her before, was guiding her aright then. Nothing 
doubting, but much wondering, she took the novel 
demand to Washington, where, after a few days of 
laughter from the shallow-minded, and of neglect from 
the indifferent, it suddenly burst upon the Federal Cap¬ 
itol like a storm, and then spanned it like a rainbow. 
She went before the Judiciary Committee, and delivered 
an argument in support of her claim to the franchise 
under the new Amendments, which some who heard it 
pronounced one of the ablest efforts which they had ev¬ 
er heard on any subject. She caught the listening ears 
of Senator Carpenter, Gen. Butler, Judge Woodward, 
George W. Julian, Gen. Ashley, Judge Loughridge, and 
other able statesmen in Congress, and harnessed these 
gentlemen as steeds to her chariot. Such was the force 
of her appeal that the whole city rushed together to hear 
it, like the Athenians to the market-place when Demos¬ 
thenes stood in his own and not a borrowed clay. A great 
audience, one of the finest ever gathered in the capital, 
assembled to hear her defend her thesis in the first pub¬ 
lic speech of her life. At the moment of rising, her face 
was observed to be very pale, and she appeared about 
to faint. On being afterward questioned as to the cause 
of her emotion, she replied that, during the first pro¬ 
longed moment, she remembered an early prediction 
of her guardian-spirit, until then forgotten, that she 
would one day speak in public, and that her first dis¬ 
course would be pronounced in the capital of her coun¬ 
try. The sudden fulfilment of this prophecy smote her 
so violently that for a moment she was stunned into ap¬ 
parent unconsciousness. But she recovered herself, and 
passed through the ordeal with great success—which is 


\ 


\ 





30 


better lnck than happened to the real Demosthenes, 
for Plutarch mentions that his maiden speech w£s a 
failure, and that he was laughed at by the people. 

Assisted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Paulina Wright 
Davis, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Susan B. Anthony, 
and other staunch and able women whom she swiftly 
persuaded into accepting this construction of the Con¬ 
stitution, she succeeded, after her petition was denied 
by a majority of the Judiciary Committee, in obtain¬ 
ing a minority report in its favor, signed jointly by 
Gen. Benj. E. Butler of Massachusetts and Judge 
Loughridge of Iowa. To have clutched this report 
from Gen. Butler—as it were a scalp from the ablest head 
in the House of Bepresentatives—was a sufficient tro¬ 
phy to entitle the brave lady to an enrolment in the 
political history of her country. She means to go to 
Washington again next winter to knock at the half- 
opened doors of the Capitol until they shall swing wide 
enough asunder to admit her enfranchised sex. 

I must say something of her personal appearance 
although it defies portrayal, whether by photograph 
or pen. Neither tall nor short, stout nor slim, she 
is of medium stature, lithe and elastic, free and 
graceful. Her side face, looked at over her left 
shoulder, is of perfect aquiline outline, as classic 
as ever went into a Roman marble, and resembles the 
masque of Shakespeare taken after death ; the same 
view, looking from the right, is a little broken and ir¬ 
regular; and the front face is broad, with prominent 
cheek bones, and with some unshapely nasal lines. 
Her countenance is never twice alike, so variable is 
its expression and so dependent on her moods. Her 
soul comes into it and goes out of it, giving her at one 
time the look of a superior and almost saintly intelli¬ 
gence, and at another leaving her dull, commonplace, 
and unprepossessing. When under a strong spiritual 
influence, a strange and mystical light irradiates from 
her face, reminding the beholder of the Hebrew Law- 


31 


giver who gave to men what he received from God and 
whose face during the transfer shone. Tennyson, as 
wiih the hand of a gold-beater, has beautifully gilded 
the same expression in his stanza of St. Stephen the 
Martyr in the article of death: 

“ And looking upward, full of grace, 

He prayed, and from a happy place, 

God’s glory smote him on the face.” 

In conversation, until she is somewhat warmed with 
earnestness, she halts, as if her mind were elsewhere, 
but the moment she brings all her faculties to her lips 
for the full utterance of her message, whether it be 
of persuasion or indignation, and particularly when 
under spiritual control, she is a very orator for elo¬ 
quence — pouring forth her sentences like a moun¬ 
tain stream, sweeping away everything that frets its 
flood. 

Her hair which, when left to itself is as long as those 
tresses of Hortense in which her son Louis Napoleon 
used to play hide-and-seek, she now mercilessly cuts 
close like a boy’s, from impatience at the daily waste of 
time in suitably taking care of this prodigal gift of 
nature. 

She can ride a horse like an Indian, and climb a tree 
like an athlete ; she can swim, row a boat, play billiards, 
and danco ; moreover, as the crown of her physical 
virtues, she can walk all day like an Englishwoman. 

“Difficulties,” says Emerson, “existto bo surmount- 
“ed.” This might be the motto of her life. In her 
lexicon (which is still of youth) there is no such word 
as fail. Her ambition is stupendous—nothing is too 
great for her grasp. Prescient of the grandeur of her 
destiny, she goes forward with a resistless fanaticism 
to accomplish it. Believing thoroughly in herself (or 
rather not in herself but in her spirit-aids) she allows no 
one else to doubt either her or them. In her case the 
old miracle is enacted anew—the faith which removes 
mountains. A soul set on edge is a conquering wea- 







32 


pon in the battle of life. Such, and of Damascus tem¬ 
per, 13 hers. 

In making an epitome of her views, I may say that 
in politics she is a downright democrat, scorning to 
divide her fellow-citizens into upper and lower classes, 
but ranking them all in one comprehensive equality of 
right, privilege, and opportunity; concerning finance, 
which is a favorite topic with her, she holds that gold 
is not the true standard of money-value, but that the 
government should abolish the gold-standard, and issue 
its notes instead, giving to these a fixed and permanent 
value, and circulating them as the only money; on so¬ 
cial questions, her theories are similar to those which 
have long been taught by John Stuart Mill and Eliza¬ 
beth Cady Stanton, and which are styled by some as 
free-love doctrines, while others reject this appella¬ 
tion on account of its popular association with the idea 
of a promiscuous intimacy between the sexes—the es¬ 
sence of her system being that marriage is of the heart 
and not of the law, that when love ends marriage should 
end with it, being dissolved by nature, and that no civil 
statute should outwardly bind two hearts which have 
been inwardly sundered ; and finally, in religion, she is 
a spiritualist of the most mystical and ethereal type. 

In thus speaking of her views, I will add to 
them another fundamental article of her creed, 
which an incident will best illustrate. Once a sick 
woman who had been given up by the physi¬ 
cians, and who had received from a Catholic priest 
extreme unction in expectation of death, was put 
into the care of Mrs. Woodhull, who attempted to 
lure her back to life. This zealous physician, unwilling 
to be bafiled, stood over her patient day and night, 
neither sleeping ncr eating for ten days and nights, at 
the end of which time she was gladdened not only at 
witnessing the sick woman’s recovery, but at finding 
that her own body, instead of weariness or exhaustion 
from the double lack of sleep and food, was more fresh 


33 


and bright than at the beginning. Her face, during this 
discipline, grew uncommonly fair and ethereal; her flesh 
wore a look of transparency ; and the ordinary earthi¬ 
ness of mortal nature began to disappear from her 
physical frame and its place to be supplied with what 
she fancied were the foretokens of a spiritual body. 
These phenomena were so vivid to her own conscious¬ 
ness and to the observation of her friends, that she was 
led to speculate profoundly on the transformation from 
our mortal to our immortal state, deducing the idea 
that the time will come when the living human body, 
instead of ending in death by disease, and dissolution in 
the grave, will be gradually refined away until it is en¬ 
tirely sloughed off, and the soul only, and not the flesh, 
remains. It is in this way that she fulfils to her daring 
hope the prophecy that ‘ ‘ The last enemy that shall be 
“ destroyed is death.” 

Engrossed in business affairs, nevertheless at any mo¬ 
ment she would rather die than live—such is her infi¬ 
nite estimate of the other world over this. But she dis¬ 
dains all commonplace parleyings with the spirit-realm 
such as are had in ordinary spirit-manifestations. On 
the other hand, she is passionately eager to see 
the spirits face to face—to summon them at her 
will and commune with them at her pleasure. Twice 
(as she unshakenly believes) she has seen a vision of Je¬ 
sus Christ—honored thus doubly over St. Paul, who 
saw his Master but once, and then was overcome by the 
sight. She never goes to any church—save to the sol¬ 
emn temple whose starry arch spans her housetop at 
night, where she sits like Simeon Stylites on his pil¬ 
lar, a worshipper in the sky. Against the inculcations 
of her childish education, the spirits have taught her 
that he whom the church calls the Saviour of the world 
is not God but man. But her reverence for him is su¬ 
preme and ecstatic. The Sermon on the Mount fills 
her eyes with tears. The exulting exclamations of the 
Psalmist are her familiar outbursts of devolion. J7or 


34 


two years, as a talisman against any temptation toward 
untruthfulness (which, with her, is the unpardonable 
sin), she wore, stitched into the sleeve of every one of 
her dresses, the 2d verse of the 120th Psalm, namely, 
“Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from a 
‘' deceitful tongue. ” Speaking the truth punctiliously, 
whether in great things or small, she so rigorously ex¬ 
acts the same of others, that a deceit practised upon 
her enkindles her soul to a flame of fire ; and she has 
acquired a clairvoyant or intuitive power to detect a lie 
in the moment of its utterance, and to smite the liar in 
his act of guilt. She believes that intellectual power 
has its fountains in spiritual inspiration. And once 
when I put to her the searching question, “ What is the 
“greatest truth that has ever been expressed in words?” 
she thrilled me with the sudden answer, ‘ ‘ Blessed are 
“ the pure in heart for they shall see God.” 

As showing that her early clairvoyant power still 
abides, I will mention a fresh instance. An eminent 
judge in Pennsylvania, in whose court-house I had once 
lectured, called lately to see me at the office of The 
Golden Age. On my inquiring after his family, he 
told me that a strange event had just happened in it. 
“ Three months ago,” said he, “ while I was in New 
“ York, Mrs. Woodhull said to me, with a rush of feel- 
“ ing, * Judge, I foresee that you will lose two of your 
“ children within six weeks. ’ ” This announcement, he 
said, wounded him as a tragic sort of trifling with life 
and death. “ But,” I asked, “did anything follow the 
“prophecy?” “Yes,” he replied, “fulfilment; I 
“lost two children within six weeks.” The Judge, 
who is a Methodist, thinks that Victoria the clairvoy¬ 
ant is like ‘ f Anna the prophetess. ” 

Let me say that I know of no person against whom 
there are more prejudices, nor any one who more quick¬ 
ly disarms them. This strange faculty is the most pow¬ 
erful of her powers. She shoots a word like a sudden 
sunbeam through the thickest mist of people’s doubts 


35 


and accusations, and clears the sky in a moment. 
Questioned by some committee or delegation who have 
come to her with idle tales against her busy life, I have 
seen her swiftly gather together all the stones which 
they have cast, put them like the miner’s quartz into 
the furnace, melt them with fierce and fervent heat, 
bring out of them the purest gold, stamp thereon her im¬ 
age and superscription as if she were sovereign of the 
realm, and then (as the marvel of it all) receive the 
sworn allegiance of the whole company on the spot. 
At one of her public meetings when the chair (as she 
hoped) would be occupied by Lucretia Mott, this 
venerable woman had been persuaded to decline 
this responsibility but afterward stepped forward on 
the platform and lovingly kissed the young speaker 
in presence of the multitude. Her enemies (save those 
of her own household,) are strangers. To see her is to 
respect her—to know her is to vindicate her. She has 
some impetuous and headlong faults, but were she with¬ 
out the same traits which produce these she would not 
possess the mad and magnificent energies which (if 
she lives) will make her a heroine of history. 

In conclusion, amid all the rush of her active life, she 
believes with Wordsworth that 

“ The gods approve the depth and not 
The tumult of the soul.” 

So, whether buffeted by criticism or defamed by slan¬ 
der, she carries herself in that religious peace which, 
through all turbulence, is “a measureless content. ” When 
apparently about to be struck down, she gathers unseen 
strength and goes forward conquering and to conquer. 
Known only as a rash iconoclast, and ranked even with 
the most uncouth of those noise-makers who are waking 
a sleepy world before its time, she beats her daily gong 
of business and reform with notes not musical but 
strong, yet mellows the outward rudeness of the rhythm 
| by the inward and devout song of one of the sincerest, 

I most reverent, and divinely-gifted of human souls. 





t 



A Weekly Journal devoted to the Free Discussion of all Living 
Questions of Church, State, Society, Literature, 

Art, and Moral Deform. 

Ptililislietl every Wednesday at No. 9 Spruce Street 
New York City. 

THEODORE TILTON, 

Editor and Publisher. 

W. T. CLARKE,.Associate Editor. 

O. W. RULAND,.Associate Publisher. 

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. 

Single copies, $3 per annum ; four copies, $10, which is $2 50 a copy; 
eight copies, $20. The party who sends $20 for a club of eight 
copies (all sent at one time) will be entitled to a copy free. Postmasters 
and others who get up clubs in their respective towns, can afterward 
add single copies at $2 50. 

THE GOLDEN AGE TRACTS. 

No. 1. “The Rights of Women.” A Letter to Horace Greeley by 
Theodore Tilton. Price 5 cents; $3 per hundred. 

No. 2. “The Constitution a Title-Deed to Woman’s Franchise.” 

A Letter to Charles Sumner by Theodore Tilton. Price 5 cents; $3 per 
hundred. 

No. 3. “ Victorlv C. Woodhull.” A Biographical Sketch. By 

Theodore Tilton. 36 pages, price 10 cents. 

No. 4. “ The Sin of Sins.” A tractate on what are called “ fallen wo¬ 
men.” By Theodore Tilton. Price 5 cents ; $3 per hundred. 

The above pamphlets will be sent to any part of the United States 
postage paid on receipt of the price. 

After you read this notice, and before you forget it, sit down and , 
write a letter to Mr. Tilton, subscribing for the paper and ordering 
some of the tracts. 

All letters should be addressed to THEODORE TILTON, 

Postoffice Box 2848, 

New York City. 






































Fallen W omen. 














<2 



TRACTS. 

No. 4. 


Bin of Bins, 


J 

THEODORE TILTON. 

V 




A 


“Shall they fall, and not arise?” 

—Isaiah. 


Published ax the Office of 


THE GOLDEN AGE, 

9 Spruce St., New York. 

1871. 


































































. 


































































- 



















»■ 






































































THE SIN OF SINS. 


“Shall they fall, and not arise?” 

—Isaiah. 

I have been thinking of the uncharitable treatment 
which society gives to what are called “ fallen wo¬ 
men. ” 

How virtuously we keep them down ! How impossi¬ 
ble we make it for them to rise again ! How inexora¬ 
bly we sentence them to a dungeon of shadows, and 
shut against them every golden gate to a future ca¬ 
reer ! 

This morning, in idling along a brook overhung with 
alders and fringed with ferns, I came upon an unexpect¬ 
ed pool which Nature had poured into a crevice be¬ 
tween some red-sandstone rocks, and sitting down be¬ 
side it, I thought of him who, in his wayside wander¬ 
ings, stopped at the Well of Sychar, and talked with 
the Woman of Samaria. 

It was a good man talking to a bad woman. 

No, let me retract that last epithet. I am say¬ 
ing the very thing myself which I condemn in the 
speech of others. Why did I let slip that word “ bad ”? 
Did he call her so ? Then what right have I to stamp 
her with this stigma ? None. 

Let me turn to the narrative. 

“ Jesus saith unto her, 

“ ‘ Go call thy husband and come hither/ 

“ The woman answered and said, 

“ ‘I have no husband. * 

“ Jesus said unto her, 






4 


“ Thou has well said, I have no husband ; for thou 
“ hast had five husbands, and he whom thou now hast 
“ is not thy husband; in that said’st thou truly.” 

Here was a woman whom the church, had she be¬ 
longed to it, would have excommunicated. How was 
she treated by the church’s founder ? Here was a wo¬ 
man who would have been ostracized by the world. 
How was she judged by him “of whom the world was 
not worthy ? ” 

In the long dialogue which he held with her, he ut¬ 
tered no syllable in rebuke of her past life ; he put no 
insult on her frailty; he cast no reproach on her way¬ 
ward love. 

“ Come,” quoth she to her neighbors, “ Come see a 
“ man who told me all things that ever I did.” 

And yet in telling them all, he gave her no wound¬ 
ing rebuke—no stinging condemnation—no recorded 
word of criticism—nothing but the same sweet eloquent 
persuasion to a higher life which he uttered equally to 
sinner and saint. 

“ How is it that thou,” she said, “ being a Jew, ask- 
“ est drink of me, who am a woman of Samaria ? for 
“ the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans ?” 

I cannot read such a question, by such a questioner, 
without wishing that those other women of Samaria— 
who walk their fearful pilgrimages up and down Broad¬ 
way at midnight—for whom there are only bitter wells 
and who drink only of poisoned waters ;—I say, I would 
to God that these women also could put the same won¬ 
dering and delighted question to some Christ of to¬ 
day, saying, 


5 


“ How is it that thou, being pure, wilt come and 
“ hold spiritual fellowship with us, being foul ?” 

I do not so much puzzle myself about the origin, as I 
do about the quality, of evil. What is sin, and what 
purity ? What is virtue, and what vice ? What is 
right, and what wrong ? A man who has never afflict¬ 
ed himself with these queries—who has never held the 
scourge of this inquest over his own mind—who has 
never used the smiting rod of this judgment upon his 
ow’n heart—knows too little of human nature to be eith¬ 
er a counselor of others or a monitor to himself. Nor 
am I ever able to survey the conduct even of the weak¬ 
est, the faultiest, and the guiltiest of men or women, 
without being suddenly estopped by that penetrating- 
maxim, “Judge not that ye be not judged, for with 
“ what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged.” And 
so I can only pity, and dare not condemn, even the 
lowest of the fallen, and the worst of the bad. 

On the contrary, I appeal to men’s two religions— 
the natural and the revealed. Did not the very brook 
that bubbled past my feet this morning seem intent to 
wash the whole world clean ? Is there not likewise a 
promise that the human heart, though its sins be as 
scarlet, can become as white as snow ? Then, if Na¬ 
ture and God thus conjoin to purify us, is it not despic¬ 
able in us to call ill names for the defiling of one anoth¬ 
er’s fame ? 

I thought, too, of that other fallen woman—that un¬ 
wanton wanton who burst in upon him while he was 
sitting at a banquet—that aspiring, transfigured, and 
immortal harlot who “ brought an alabaster-box of oint- 



6 


“ ment and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and 
“began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them 
“ with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet and 
“anointed them with the ointment.” 

Where is there a more exquisite tale in literature, or 
where a more beautiful lesson in charity ? 

“Now when the Pharisee who had bidden him saw it, 
“ he spake within himself saying, ‘This man, if he were a 
“prophet, would have known who and what manner of 
‘ ‘ woman this is that toucheth him, for she is a sin¬ 
ger.’” 

A sinner ? Yes, and therefore an exile from society. 
A sinner ? Yes, and therefore disentitled to sit at good 
men’s feasts. A sinner? Yes, and therefore con¬ 
demned to outer darkness where there is weeping and 
gnashing of teeth. 

“Simon,” said the god-like guest to the man-like 
host, “ seest thou this woman ?” 

No, Simon had never seen her. That is, he saw not 
the woman, but only the drab—not her womanhood, 
but only her shame. He was blind. The Master then 
pricked open his eyes, and sent through them a sudden 
sunbeam that carried a new light into his cobwebbed 
soul. 

“ Simon,” said he, “I entered into thine house, thou 
“ gavest me no kiss ; but this woman, since the time I 
“ came in, hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head 
“with oil thou didst not anoint; but this woman hath 
“ anointed my feet with ointment. ” 

The point was pressed home by double antithesis. 
The Pharisee in his proud propriety was convicted of 



7 


being outdone in courtesy by a woman of the streets. * 
Her gentle manners, therefore, had not forsaken her. 
The ministering kindliness of her woman’s nature still 
remained. Kneeling at her Master’s feet, the homage 
which she still knew how to pay to virtue was as fra¬ 
grant as the perfume in her box. 

Then from the Lord’s lips came a remark which, like 
a bee, carried honey to the woman, but a sting to the 
man. What must they both have thought of the mar¬ 
vellous audacity of that mild guest who, in defiance of 
all the laws of Moses, of all the traditions of the elders, 
and of all the sanctities of society, suddenly exclaimed 
to the man, 

‘ ‘ I say unto thee, her sins, which are many, are for- 
“ given, for she loved much”; and who, turning at the 
same time to the woman, repeated the same strange 
speech, 

“Thy sins are forgiven—go in peace.” 

I quote and emphasize these words for the sake of 
asking this question, namely, 

If forgiven by him, why not then forgiven by us 
all ? 

The birds could not have sung so sweetly as they did 
this morning, neither could the sky have kept so bright 
a blue, nor the earth dressed herself in so soft a green, 
if the human heart, for which the earth and all that 
it contains were made, must remain forever perverted 
from its Maker by so strange a fact as that its warmest 
love should suddenly constitute its chiefest sin. 

Thinking this thought, I then suddenly saw in the 
gravel-path at my feet the strange handwriting which 



8 

the man of Nazareth once stooped and wrote npon the 
ground. I mean, I saw it not in fact but in fancy. How 
runs the tale ? 

“ And the Scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a 
woman taken in adultery, in the very act. 

“ ‘Now Moses in the law commanded us that such 
be stoned ; but what sayest thou ? ’ 

“Jesus stooped down, and with his finger Wrote on 
the ground, as though he heard them not. So when 
they continued asking him, he lifted up himself and 
said unto them, 

“ ‘ He that is without sin among you, let him first 
cast a stone. ’ 

Without what sin ? Not all sins in general, but one 
sin in particular. The hypocrites, every one of them, 
had sinned it. And, furthermore, most men since then 
have been the like sinners, and are to this day. 

“And again he stooped dowm, and wrofe on the 
“ ground, and they which heard it, being convicted by 
“ their own conscience, went out one by one,beginning at 
“the eldest,even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone, 
“ and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus 
“ had lifted up himself and saw none but the woman,he 
“ said unto her, 

“ ‘Woman, who are those thine accusers ? Hath no 
‘ ‘ man condemned thee ? * 

“ She said, 

“ ‘ No man, Lord.’ 

“ And Jesus said unto her, 

“ ‘Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no 
“ more.’ ” 


9 


Did I not say that I knew what he wrote on the 
ground ? Perhaps I err in my imaginings. Nor will 
I venture to put his great thoughts into my weak 
words. But I believe that as the woman’s sin was of 
the earth earthy, he therefore engraved upon the very 
earth itself the everlasting record of her pardon ! So 
that any woman who should thereafter, in all coming 
time, fall from her purity even to the street, and be 
trodden under foot of men, and grovel in the dust, 
might then and there, in the very soilure and defile¬ 
ment with which she is begrimed, beEoTdTthe eternal 
decree, “ Thy sins are forgiven—go in peace.” 

It is written of this teacher that “he spake as never 
“man spake.” This, I am sure, is true. For, what 
man ever said of a woman taken in adultery, 

“ Neither do I condemn thee.” 

It requires something of the godhead to say that ! 

During my rambles I reflected on that great impar¬ 
tiality of Nature which sends the sun and the rain alike 
on the just and the unjust—in contra-distinction to 
the miserable partiality of human judgment as one sees 
it in this very case. 

“ They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken 
“ in adultery, in the very act. ” 

If so, then not only the woman was taken, but also 
the man. But what became of the man ? The woman 
was dragged to the temple to be stoned. The man 
probably went away among his companions to laugh. 
Indeed, there is no evidence that he was not her chief 
accuser, and the ringleader in her punishment. 

Now let me point the moral which adorns this 







10 


tale. If the woman’s crime merits martyrdom, what does 
the man’s ? If she was a sinner, what was he ? And yet 
how does the world judge between the two culprits ? 
Ah, now as then, and in every such case, the Scribes 
and Pharisees meet together to forgive the man, and 
then go away and leave it to Christ alone to forgive 
the woman ! 

Sleepy Hollow. 











rx 




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